What I'm reading:
The Great Mortality: by John Kelly
I've just started this one; picked it up because it's about a pandemic. As I said a while back, my history quirkiness is that I'm a Spanish Influenza Buff. The two historical events are not unrelated. So far it's pretty cool. As an added bonus, I turned the tv over to the history channel this evening, and they're repeating the series about the Little Ice Age, which occurred around the same time as the Plague years.
Why am I so fascinated with these things? Maybe it's the empath in me. These were times of horribly enhanced emotions. Grief, and loss, and pain. The guilt of survival. I know these things as they relate to another set of circumstances. I know the survivor's guilt of both childhood cancer and child abuse. It's not easy; hell- the hardest part of any lifechanging event is living through it. The easy part is giving up and dying, and I guess that I'm too stubborn to ever lay down and quit. I could have a worse fault than stubbornness.