Every time I try to leave they pull me back in.

Yesterday I got a sweet little offer from the History Book Club: 4 books for a buck each, an optional fifth half-off, and a little green book bag thrown in as a freebie. I'm surprised by the number of great books I found just on a first flip-through of the catalog. Jasper Ridley's The Freemasons: A History of the World's Most powerful Secret Society has been on my Amazon wishlist for quite some time. I'd never heard of Geoffrey Wawro or his book on the Franco-Prussian War, but its one of my favorite wars and as far as I can tell not much has been written about it in the English language. The Franco-Prussian War is a good little war to study, like the Falklands War. You can actually get a pretty good overview of it from a single book. I'd read more about the Napoleonic era or the two World Wars, but those conflicts are so huge its hard to get a good grasp of the whole war without reading a whole crapload of books. In the "WTF?" department, the Historic Book Club is also offering When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops by George Carlin. I don't understand it, but if they want to sell me a book like that for a buck, why should I question it? That's three great books out of four (possibly five) on the first pass through the catalog.

And my last free little green book bag is starting to look threadbare, so there's another reason to sign up.