What were his first choice of books?
hint
He’s German and moved to Latinamerica in the 50s.
answer
Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis and some other book about Rome that I don’t remember.
He’s German and moved to Latinamerica in the 50s.
Uh…
Uhhhh…
M…Mein Kampf?
okay, cool, good, great, it’s not overt-Nazi shit, hope your dad has fun
No, he’s just reeeeally into Roman history, I grew up hearing about that stuff constantly. Also viking stories, like about Erik the Red and Leif Erikson. His dad was in the Wehrmacht and spent 4 years in a POW camp in Russia so my dad really hates Russia and is constantly bringing up the horseshoe theory. I don’t think my grandad himself hated the Russians though, he was a big fan of the Red Army Choir, had a few LPs.
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome
I just read that one, I was gonna suggest it, lmao
Aren’t those in the public domain? He doesn’t need piracy for that! Was the other one Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii?
He’ll also like Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God; Steven Saylor’s detective novels based on Cicero speeches, and maybe some of Colleen McCullough’s First Men of Rome series before it gets too Caesar-can-do-no-wrong. Maybe Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian.
For Viking stories - The Long Ships, by Frans Bengtsson.
Oh, for sure, they’re all 19th century books. He can probably get everything he’s interested in reading from Project Gutenberg or something.
No, it wasn’t The Last Days of Pompeii, it ended with am Rom I think.
I’ll pass on those recommendations lol. When I was a kid he had us reading the viking stories in the car on the way to school so we would practice our German, I thought they were cool stories tbh. I had forgotten all about them until I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse book recently.
