Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...
You'll need to be more specific about the topic, and I'm sure Al would be happy to help out here.
If you needed just a random suggestion, you could do worse than Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies mentioned above. It's a book about countries that once existed but no longer do, and its 15 chapters are all basically stand-alone (and if you're an e-book guy you can actually get the chapters of that book a la carte). That nature makes the book go from its rather intimidating 700+ pages to basically a collection of 15 reasonable-length essays.
Personally (having read 13 of the 15 chapters so far) I find the chapters very varying in the quality. The Irish chapter was a trolling exercise which was full of minor factual errors. Some of the chapters - in particular those entitled 'Etruria' and 'Rosenau' - were a bit 'meh' as they focused too much, at least for my taste, on gossip with crowns on disguised as history. He also gets bogged down with detail in long places, especially with the minutiae of trying convince everyone that Poland is/was very important and Historians and commentators are ridiculously biased against Eastern Europe. Both correct, but a bit overdone.
However that isn't to say that I'm not enjoying it. It's a really intriguing work, if a little frustrating.
