WHAT have you finished reading recently? And There Was Light, Jon Meacham. A biography of Abraham Lincoln.

WHAT are you reading now? I am listening to The Rivalry, a play composed by Norman Corwin. It turns the Lincoln-Douglas debates into a two-hour performance delivered by Paul Giamatti (Stephen A. Douglas) and David Straitharn (Abraham Lincoln). I began this on the heels of watching Lincoln, in which Straitharn plays Secretary of State Seward against Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln. I was listening to a dramatization of The Hobbit but needed a break from the goblin/monster voices in general.

WHAT are you reading next? I need to read something that’s not history, but I am looking at both In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer and The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo as followups to my Meacham biographies. I also ordered With Malice Towards None, a much-hailed Lincoln biography.

And now, today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews, which is….”funny titles”. I’ve done this twice before , at five-year intervals, and will follow the same approach I did at my last interval. I’ll take the ‘current winning’ list and see if anything I’ve read in the last five years can unseat the current champions! As it turns out, there was only one change: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid replaced Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff.

How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming, Mike Brown
Death from the Skies!, Phil Plait
Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein
They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? Christopher Buckley
The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head Gary Small

Hey, Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?, John Siegal Boettner
Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
How To Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen
Prepare to Meet Thy Doom: And Other Gaming Stories, David Kushner
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Biology of Climate Change, Thor Hanson