Recent and Near-Future Reading (and Writing)

As you might know from my most recent post, I just finished A Storm of Swords.  This puts me at least a whole season ahead of HBO's Game of Thrones, which should help me to avoid spoilers.  Now, I can get back to the business at hand:  reading planetary romance, starting with the John Carter of Mars books.
... except that my plans have changed.
You see, I set out to read planetary romance as a form of research in preparation for NaNoWriMo, but my thoughts on the novel that I was to write have transformed it from throw-away adventure into magnum opus. It feels as weird as it sounds.  Anyway, that means that I'm shelving it until I get more practice at this whole novel thing.  So, what do I do now?
Thanks to cthulhuchick on twitter, I've discovered that one John Maddox Roberts wrote a series of mystery novels that take place in ancient Rome.  Throw-away comment about vampires in ancient Rome?  You're becoming a throw-away novel about vampires in ancient Rome.
New problem:  I know nothing about ancient Rome, and it's about the end of August.  This is not enough time to learn about ancient Rome and fully outline a novel!  What do I do?
I'm basically looking at two options now:
1.  I re-attempt last year's novel.
2.  I skip NaNoWriMo this year.
Unless I get a story idea about a subject with which I'm already familiar, these are my two options, and they're both looking about equal right now.

So, my reading schedule, at the moment, is some SPQR, some Barsoom, and some H.P. Lovecraft.

Vampires?

Well, I didn't manage to win NaNoWriMo this year, but I've learned some things, and hopefully I can do better next year.  Speaking of that, one thing that I'm considering doing is something about vampires.  The main reason for this is that vampires have been getting some odd treatments lately, most notably in the form of Twilight, and I thought that it might be nice to take vampires back on the ancient magical beings route, rather than the mutant/nanotech/retroviral stuff or the, y'know, sparkly romantic stuff.
One idea - not thoroughly developed, mind you - had to do with vampires in the Roman senate - or, since they would probably meet during the day, manipulating the Roman senate from afar.  Though, if I wanted to do that justice, then I'd have to learn about ancient Roman politics and the like - SPQR and all that.
Whatever it is, I'd like to choose my NaNoWriMo 2012 idea before Xmas, so that I can start researching and outlining and all that.