I just finished a week off, for which I'm appropriately thankful. I can't wait to see what kind of mess the office is in.... Nah, I'm sure everything is fine. I work for the gubmint, after all.

Even with the week off, I didn't get much reading done. I blame HBO's free weekend, or something. Truth be told, I'm still trying to finish The Black Count (highly recommended).

But for the sake of this feature, I started something new last night: Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox.

I'm only a chapter in, so it is a bit premature to be assessing. My main fear is that the author is trying to hard to story-ify the history. Whereas Tom Reiss's The Black Count manages to tell an engaging story while clearly maintaining a popular historian's quasi-scholarly edge, Carrell's book (or the first chapter, at least) swings much further into literary territory, striving to read more like a novel.

That said, others have praised her book for historical and medical accuracy. So, she's got that going for her. I'll see how far I get.

What are you reading?