Book Chatter: Recent Reading

So I'm feeling a bit burnt out on short fiction. I read a ton of things to empty out my to-read folder before the new year. (I have bookmarking system of online shorts. Everything goes into the short fiction folder which has a bunch of sub-folders. One of these is to-read. The others are year of publication.) So I'm taking a break for reading short ficion and hoping that I feel more excited about it soon. This might mean that it takes longer to get my 2014 recs up. If don't get them up by the end of the month I want to remind you to think about becoming a hugo voter. If you do before Jan 31 you get nominating privileges.

I recently got really sucked into a book! Now I want to tell everyone how good it was and how much I enjoyed it. But it was academic history book. So I doubt most of my readership would be interested. And I wouldn't consider it super accessible. Anyways it is called Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett. The book is about a trial in NYC in 1818 to determine if a whale is fish. The author uses it as jumping off point to explore how different people saw whales at the time. It is very meticulously researched.

Anyways I'm going on vacation on the 13 so right now I'm trying to read all my library books before then. Currently reading A Hero at the End of the World by Erin Claiborne. It has illustrations!

By the way I'm thinking of having another go at reading Plato's Republic before I read The Just City by Jo Walton which comes out this month. Does any one have a recommendation for good translation? Bonus points if it is available for free or cheap in epub format.