When does history merge into the present? I'm big on reading about the actual people of the past rather than a list of dates, and recently I've been on a royalty binge. Victoria's Daughters (Jerrold M. Packard) led to Michael John Sullivan's A Fatal Passion: The Story of Victoria Melita, the Uncrowned Last Empress of Russia, one of Queen Victoria's granddaughters, which brought up the rather weird (to me) point that there are still heirs to the Imperial throne of Russia. Tsar Nicholas II with his wife and children were killed by the Soviets, but descendants of Nicholas' cousins still exist and are still given the title of Grand Duke (or Grand Duchess).

Obviously I knew England still had a monarchy -- it's difficult in the English-speaking world to escape news coverage of the English royal family. But I've always found the royals of the past and the power that they wielded to be more interesting than the current ones who seem more hemmed in by their symbolic role than anything else.

It's just odd, though, to think of those descended from royalty and nobility, bearers of titles no longer recognized in the countries that once granted them. They may be only great-nephews and -nieces of those who actually ruled, but they are the people who would rule if there were still monarchies.

It's even weird to think of kaisers, tsars, and kings as forming part of a time with remotely modern technology. Gordon Brook-Shepherd's Royal Sunset: The European Dynasties and The Great War goes over the roles of European rulers in the causes of World War I, and frequently mentions governments and rulers sending telegrams to one another, and even Edward VI of England giving Franz Josef of Austria his first ride in a car. It underlines the humanity of royalty in a way that even Henry VIII's six wives or Peter the Great's passion for boating never could.

So The Royal Families of Europe, by Geoffrey Hindley, was an interesting peek into the present lives of royals. Prince Nicola Petrovic of Montenegro is an architect in Paris, but apparently 200,000 Montenegrins came to see him on his trip to his family's homeland on 1989. Dr. Otto Habsburg of the family which used to rule Austria and Hungary (but now a German national) was elected to a seat in the European Parliament; his son is a program director for a Hungarian TV station. Louis Ferdinand, a younger son of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, worked for the Ford company in the U.S. for a while, though he later went back to Europe and married a daughter of Grand Duke Kyrill, who would have been next in line for the Russian throne.

Reading about the marriages between members of the royal families particularly boggles the mind -- that same Louis Ferdinand's will designated one of his grandsons as his heir because all his sons except that grandson's father had married women of low rank. One of the disinherited sons challenged the will in court, but Germany's Supreme Court ruled against the challenges.

King Simeon of Bulgaria (living in exile in Spain) even has a website where you can send him e-mail! (I wonder if a monarchy in exile runs to the same number of assistants who would take care of correspondence, or if Simeon actually reads his own e-mail.)

The ones who do still reign in Europe are described in Laure Boulay and Francoise Jaudel's There Are Still Kings: The Ten Royal Families of Europe as largely performing a businesslike function of signing papers and making public appearances. There's nothing wrong with that -- both books on modern monarchy credit the royal house of Belgium with a major part in holding the country's two ethnic groups together under one government -- but it's a far cry from most people's visions of kingship or queenship. Fascinating to know, yes, but a little bit of magic leaves the world, even for an egalitarian American like me, on finding out what the 20th century did to royalty.

Agnostic that I am, I picked up Mark Pinsky's The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World's Most Animated Family mostly out of curiosity. I'm the type of Simpsons fan who can parrot entire conversations from the show, and I didn't really see what pro-religion message could be gotten from my favorite show.

However, Pinksy showed me a lot I hadn't noticed about the show, probably because I'm entrenched in my own beliefs. Once it's pointed out, it becomes a lot more obvious that The Simpsons is one of the few TV shows to deal with religious faith at all. How many sitcoms ever show their characters attending religious services or praying? And yet these are important parts of many people's lives -- this animated show is here more realistic than most live-action ones. The show certainly makes fun of religion-related topics at times, but it makes fun everything else, too. Is religion being mocked when Homer Simpson cries out "I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman!"? Or is it the naive attitude of many who look at the supreme being they believe in as only there to make things better for them?

The Christian part of the book also brought home to me the difference between belief in salvation by faith and by works. I had certainly known about this distinction, but the book's examples made things much clearer, (in a similar way to my mother and I referring to Gone with the Wind when discussing social interaction -- fiction can be more instructive than reality). Of course the faith/works issue brings up many more questions for me -- if, as Pinsky says, The Simpsons usually represents an Old Testament-based religion with more emphasis on works than faith, why does the show ring so true in comparison to real-life Christians who claim that belief in Jesus is salvation? If that belief is salvation, then why are numerous Christians (at least a very loud minority) campaigning to control others' behavior?

As its name implies (at least to me) the book spends more time dealing with Christianity on the show, but does not completely neglect other faiths, since major characters Krusty the Clown and Apu are Jewish and Hindu, respectively. There's not as much reference to the beliefs of these religions in the show or in the book -- the chapters on Judaism and Hinduism mostly deal with their interface with the U.S.'s Christian-majority culture. One wonders what an Israeli or Indian cartoon who with the same irreverent attitude would be like.

So the book really does rather well as an overview of religion in American life in the past few years. It won't convert any Simpsons fans who weren't already religious, but it points out examples to help people like me understand the mindset of the faithful, and it might make humor a little more palatable for those not inclined to see any kind of faith as a laughing matter.

Heavy metal has this reputation for being dumb and attracting dumb fans. So it confused lots of people to see me reading heavy metal magazines in honors classes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially as I didn't dress the part. A book that mirrors my experience is Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman. Despite the title, most of this book applied perfectly well to my Florida experience as a metal fan. This is a fun read for anyone who appreciates the era when pop-metal bands were all over MTV but the people who considered themselves true fans complained that real metal was nearly ignored. And it was truly great to find out that I'm not the only metal fan who also liked the B-52s (Klosterman actually has an explanation for that seeming oddity).

I've grown up listening to blues-influenced rock music, but it's relatively recent that I've sought out the artists who are considered pure blues. In addition to listening, I'm reading, and I particularly enjoyed Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King by B.B. King with David Ritz. Ritz's presence is invisible until he speaks out in the final chapter, and so this book is not just a story of one musician's life, but a social history of most of the 20th century in the United States as it touched that musician, from families sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta to the influence of foreign rock'n'roll in the 1960s (and the 1980s when King did "When Love Comes To Town" with U2). And unlike many biographies, there doesn't seem to be any effort to portray personal relationships as sweetness and light, or blame others for financial problems -- it's all told in a very straightforward and personal manner.

So after that, Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century by Charles Shaar Murray is rather a disappointment. Of course, it isn't claiming to be an autobiography, but the voice of the well-educated music critic gets on my nerves when I'm reading about the bluesman who "doesn't read too fluently." It gets even more annoying when the book switches back and forth between the colloquial Southern English (my home tongue, being raised in South Carolina) of extended quotations from Hooker and his family members, and the much fancier wording of the author. To me, blues, like any music, is about feeling, and calling Hooker a "master raconteur" doesn't really feel like praise of his ability to put across a story. I admit I haven't finished the book yet, but it doesn't seem to likely that Murray's style will change that much in the rest. I don't think I'll be seeking out other music biographies by the same author.

What is money? What is art? The answer to the first question seems a lot more obvious than the second, until you read Lawrence Wescher's Boggs: A Comedy of Values. This book tells the story of J.S.G. Boggs, an artist who is best known for drawing very-nearly-exact reproductions of paper money bills and spending them in exchange for items one would normally buy with those "actual" paper bills. He even gets change back in "official" money. The book chronicles nearly fifteen years of Boggs' work, including his being put on trial in England for reproducing Bank of England notes, and harrassment by other governments for counterfeiting. But the fascinating part is the exchanges -- the people who won't take Boggs' drawings as a medium of exchange, and the people who will, and the reasons both give. (Such as the Orthodox Jewish-run establishment which says it won't take the drawing because graven images are forbidden by the Ten Commandments, though it does accept normal money.) Is it counterfeiting if you make it clear that the drawings aren't "real" bills, and you never intend to pass them as such? Does it matter that the drawings have sold to collectors (after Boggs "spends" them) for several times their "face value"?

If I sent the artist a letter asking if he'd like to exchange a drawing of his for, say, a knitted blanket or a handmade Christmas ornament, what makes that technically "barter," but the exchange of a U.S. government-issued bill a "sale"? Would that be different if I exchanged my handiwork for bills in Euros or yen or Australian dollars or some currency legitimized by the government of a country I have never visited and have no immediate plans to? All these freaky questions are evoked by reading this book, which contains discussion of not only Boggs' work but that of other artists who have involved money in some way in their creation, and the history of money as well. It is a rare work that explains art in a way that makes sense to the rational part of my brain, and such supposedly rational pursuits as economics and law start to seem nonsensical in comparison to art after reading this book. And I do mean that as a compliment.

Economics. History. Art. No matter which of these subjects piques your interest, The Art of Money by David Standish as something for you. Pictures of paper money from around the world and covering quite a few decades (centuries, for American money), all nicely captioned to tell you why there's an ancient Greek sculpture on Ireland's ten-pound bill; what's up with the apparently abstract design on one side of the Swiss ten-franc bill; what countries put lizards on their money; and when the United States had bare-breasted women on money. Stories about inflation, the genesis of using paper instead of coins, and the political results of England keeping English money out of its North American colonies -- and amusing remarks by the author sprinkled throughout. This is the closest thing to an economics book that I've ever found interesting -- probably because it's not dry theory but colorful reality -- dig the near-photographic image of the sea turtle on the money from the Comoros Islands!

I'm a suburban girl who generally thinks of plants as being nice landscaping or the source of my spring allergy problems. There are a few flowers I can identify, but that's about it. So David Attenborough's The Private Life of Plants really gave me a new view on plants; they're not just things to be stepped on or provide a visual break from buildings, but living beings that are just as interesting as animals. TV networks such as PBS, the Discovery Channel, and obviously from its name, Animal Planet, supply tons of nature documentaries on the animal kingdom, but the documentary film that this book accompanies (also called The Private Life of Plants) uses time-lapse photography to show that plants live in motion, even if it's too slow for the normal human eye to see. But even the book is terribly well illustrated, with just the right still (or series of stills) to show the pebble plant of Africa which avoids being eaten because it looks exactly like a rock, the various types of pitcher plants which evolved ways to catch bugs in little reservoirs of liquid, and the fungi which grow on your local trees. (Yes, I know a fungus isn't a plant, and Attenborough points this out too, but due to such things as lichens, which turn out to be fungi and algae working together as one organism, the book does wander into fungi in some places.) In a very readable manner, avoiding biologist jargon, the book really explains the incredible variety of plants on the planet; the ways, from commonplace to peculiar, that they manage to survive; and the way that plants, other plants, animals, fungi, and even humans work together for mutual benefit.