This is a sort of summer reads list except these books will probably take longer than the summer to get through. In an ideal world over the next few weeks I might get through these:
D-Day by Anthony Beevor
Naples 44 by Norman Lewis
The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
There is also a memoir by Eva Figes and a real doorstopper of a book about French history since 1900. Those might be too ambitious for the summer.