Faust has been sitting on my bookshelf for close to two years now, waiting for me to read it. I had kept neglecting the book, but promising to read it eventually, since finishing The Magic Mountain. Finally, I decided to throw it in my pack for New York.

Kaufmann’s translation includes the German on one page and the English on the opposite, allowing one to view the original work in conjunction to what you’re reading. A novel and appreciated addition, even though the only German I know was learned from killing Nazi zombies in Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Goethe is full of wit and humor – twisted, sexual humor that would make Tipper Gore gorge out her eyes – that comes across well in Kaufmann’s translation. I found it quite enjoyable. It inspires you to push through the somewhat more confusing scenes that lack the entertainment of Mephisto. (Like those angles up in heaven. Why would anyone want to go hang out with those boring, drab, self righteous egotists when you could be with Mephisto and his wenches during Walpurgis Night?) I think a great many more people would enjoy the book, if they would only give it a shot.

Robert Young Pelton’s Licensed to Kill is the definitive post-9/11 book on guns-for-hire. From Baghdad’s Route Irish to the Afghan/Pakistan border, RYP is able to enter the closed world of mercenaries, PMC/PSC, and other contractors in a way that academics and reporters cannot.

In a world where Blackwater is deputized, this seems an important book for all. Like the guns they wield, mercenaries can be used for good or evil.

(Those interested in the EO/Sandline mercs of the ‘90’s would do well to add Three Worlds Gone Mad to their reading list.)

It was recommended to me last summer that I read Lonely Planet’s Travel Writing. I expected the book to be about the art, but instead it focused more on the details of how one enters the travel writing and scene and how to get published – something I have little interest in. If you’re serious about making travel writing a profession, particularly if you’re interested in writing for guide books, then this may be a worthwhile read. For the rest of us… just write.

Three Worlds Gone Mad: The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven gets back to what RYP does best: storytelling. The book documents Robert Young Pelton’s journeys to three different war-zones (Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville) and his attempts to understand the place and its people. Like in DP, Pelton manages to explain the places better than any history text. Where else are you able to see from the eyes of pirate hunting mercs, American ex-CIA jihadists, and hermit rebel leaders? Unconstrained from the limits of a journalism, Pelton shows us firsthand a world outside of our own – a glimpse into war-torn regions of the world – and the ordinary people who inhabit them.

I highly recommend this book to and fans of RYP and, for those who have never read his works, this is a good place to start.

I picked up the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin at one of those library book sales a few years ago for something like $1. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf, neglected, ever since – though I kept telling myself I’d read it one day. Finally, I have.

I enjoyed the book a good deal. Though I can’t say I agree with all of Franklin’s politics or his racist leanings, I did enjoy the writing style and the insight into the times. It’s impressive how varied a man he was, seemingly every institution and employment being touched by him at some point. (And the book only goes to 30 years before his death.) I wouldn’t use the book as a mold to shape my life to, which was the book’s intention, but it’s still a good read.

The Fairhaven Folktales of Dirty Dan Harris by Michael Sean Sullivan is a fun little bit of local history. It concerns the life and times of “Dirty” Danial Harris, the sailor and whiskey smuggler who founded the town of Fairhaven in the 1800s. Dirty Dan had a reputation as quite the story teller in his time, this book being the recounting of his tales that were orally passed down after his death.