How to fill time in retirement

Recently, I have rekindled an interest in the Great War, now called World War I. Partly this interest stems from two books I have read and more recently, a movie I watched on HBO. Growing up as a child, I would hear about family related war stories but never paid much attention. Now I regret that I did not sit and listen to either my dad or my grandfather, and ask them about the Wars. The first book which I read this past August, was the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Written in 1928, it tells about the brutalities of the war from a German Perspective. World War I was a trench war, with a large line called the Western Front with respect to Germany. Located mostly in Northeast France near Luxembourg and Belgium. It never reached to Paris but it consisted of a stretch of No-Man's land with trenches on one side filled with Germans and trenches on the other side full of French and British and their allies. Although the war started in 1914, it was not unt...

 In the last three months, I have continued my reading but had a slow down with one of the books I read. I was struggling to get through it but decided to push on and try to finish it. At the end of August, I had finished 29 books from my list and 19 books read for pleasure. That was 48 books in 52 weeks. Not bad. The last three months I have only read 7 books, four of those from my list. First, the books from my list (#30 - #33) that I read: Book #30 was the novel  For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Not on my original 100, I added it later and I am glad I did. Published in 1940, it tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia. I am slowly learning that a war setting makes for a great story. I gave the book a 4.0 (Excellent) and I plan to read more Hemingway. He did win a Nobel Prize for...