Lars Brownworth' s seventeenth and final installment of his 12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire podcast series has just been released.  I know, "blah, blah, blah, boring" right?  Wrong.  I downloaded this for free from iTunes on a whim (sometimes I get a hankering for some good non-fictiony stuff) and was immediately hooked.  This guy manages to make a subject that once bored the hell out of me...really, really interesting.  He talks about 12 of the most important rulers in Byzantine history in such a familiar way that  they seem like friends and aquaintances of his, not long dead figures out of the very distant past.  I mean, I got really caught up in this story, to the point that I actually cried at the end of the second-to-last installment, when Brownworth tells the story of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI and his heroic final stand in Constantinople as the Turks invaded.  Cried, over ancient history!  And not only that, I became so interested in these characters that I' ve been researching and learning more about them on my own--for fun!  Oh, this guy is good.  Anyway, if you have even the mildest interest in history, you' ve got to check this series out.  And since it' s totally free, you really can' t lose.