Read This Not That This Summer

So The Federalist asked a bunch of notables in the conservosphere, and me, what they were reading this summer. Click here for their, and my, responses.

To help you get into the mood, below are two of the titles I included in my list, one of which seemed to catch the attention of a few commenters:

“Lutherans against Hitler,” by Lowell C. Green. The rap against Lutherans is that they are political quietists, happy to go along with any regime, no matter how authoritarian, in the name of good order. This book attempts to set the record straight in at least one historical context, detailing confessional Lutherans’ very early critical response to the rise of Nazism, using documentation not previously available to scholars. …

“Cryptonomicon,” by Neal Stephenson. Considered a historical-fiction masterpiece, it’s one of those baroque encyclopedias that straddles two eras: World War II and the birth of modern cryptography and the dotcom-bubble 90s, Bletchley meets Silicon Valley. The reviews read to me as if it were the polyamorous collusion of Umberto Eco, John Barth, P.K. Dick, and William Gibson, so who wouldn’t be curious? I tried getting into this thing a while back but was crushed under the weight of both its girth and its genius. I’m going to give it another go, but I make no promises. I said, I make no promises!