For Saturday Night Genealogy Fun this week, Randy Seaver is asking “What Books Do You Read?”

First, I have to admit that most of my reading for pleasure is done when we are on the road or on a cruise ship and then it’s on my iPad.

I have always preferred non-fiction to fiction, whether it is WordPress, the missing manual by Matthew McDonald, the user manuals to RootsMagic 7, Legacy 8 and Family Historian 6 or George G. Morgan’s How to Do Everything Genealogy, Fourth Edition, which I am using as a textbook for the genealogy group that I volunteer teach.

For pleasure, I’ve recently read Growing Up in Passaic and Climbing the Rainbow, both by Bob Rosenthal about life in Passaic from the 1930s to the 1960s. Passaic is my hometown.

On the iPad, I have several of Thomas MacEntee’s genealogy guides to read on our upcoming trip – After You’re Gone, The 15 Habits of Highly Frugal Genealogists and Digitization Options for Family Photos.

I also have Priscilla, The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime Paris by Nicholas Shakespeare, The Sisters, The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell, The Presidents Club by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, Born to Run, the new autobiography by Bruce Springsteen available on 27 September, and the newly released The Stranger in My Genes: A Memoir by Bill Griffeth on the agenda to read while we are traveling.

You can probably see where my interests lie based on my reading – if it isn’t directly related to family history and/or skills needed to share family history, it’s historical-biographical in nature.

Did the chicken or the egg come first?  Have my natural reading interests (the chicken) influenced my adult reading preferences or has my love of genealogy and learning more about history (the egg) guided my current reading selections? In my case, I think the chicken came first, as I have always loved history!