2025 Reading List
After several years of barely reading–a backlash to the ferocious pace at which I was forced to consume book knowledge in graduate school–I set myself a reading goal for this year: 12. Spoiler alert, I finished 29. Three “patterns” or tendencies emerged in my reading habit this year. First, I transitioned from an interest in the Classical World to the Medieval or Middle Ages. Second, I read way more novels this year than probably any year before. And third, I discovered audiobooks.
Taking those in reverse order. Audiobooks, just “wow.” I was perhaps fortunate that my first audiobook was Adam Zamoyski’s, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. I hadn’t heard of Zamoyski prior to this book but what an amazing historian. It was one of the longer books I listened to at 17-1/2 hours–and it only covered a single year of events–but it was such a compelling story and the level of detail he described was drawn from a vast array of sources. I heard not only what Napolean and his generals were thinking–and his generals were quite a cast of characters–but Zamoyski spent considerable time with sources written by the common soldiers who suffered dearly during this disastrous campaign. What I also quickly learned from this audiobook was the importance of the narrator. I don’t know if I got “lucky” with the audiobooks I listened to this year, but the narrator in every single one of them was top drawer and absolutely made the content more enjoyable. This was especially true for the second, sixth, eighth, ninth, and tenth audiobook that I listened to which were all novels. The skill of the narrators to subtly voice different characters or to deliver the nonfiction content with such authority and clarity has made me an audiobook fan for life. Another aspect of audiobooks that I appreciated was the different contexts in which I could consume the content, that is, while I was on long drives, either to Davis to work or to the Bay Area for my long runs, or while I was on a long run, was fantastic. I listened to most of Dan Jones’s, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty during my Monterey 50-miler and his Lion Hearts during the California International Marathon. In total I listened to 11 audiobooks and all of them were borrowed from the library. I contemplated an audible subscription, but the Sacramento Public Library has been a great success so far. (I also borrowed a third of the non-audiobooks I read from the Sac Library.) Admittedly, some of the books are quite long and I have to check them out more than once which is inconvenient if it’s a popular book. For example, I started Rick Atkinson’s first book in his trilogy of the American Revolution, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, and because it’s 26 hours long, I will have to check it out at least twice but because it’s so popular, I am on a 6-8 week waitlist in between listens. (I won’t say too much about this book since it’ll be a book I record for 2026, but it is also an amazing book ala Zamoyski’s 1812 in terms of the rich detail describing the conflict.)
The second notable experience of my reading list this year was the number of novels I read. As noted, the tendency accelerated when I discovered audiobooks due to the richness of the experience they provided for this genre. My first encounter with this aspect of audiobooks came with my second one when I finally engaged with work by Mark Twain. It is one of my educational shortcomings to be sure, but I have read very few of the great novels of humanity. (Although I would say that one of my all-time favorite books is The Odyssey followed closely by The Iliad.) So, I went with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and I have to say, I was not all that impressed. It was fine, just not my cup of tea, as they say. But, again, that was where I discovered the value a talented narrator can add to any story. In fact, all but one of the novels I finished this year were audiobooks. And that one, the first one I finished this year, is what lead to my discovery of Zamoyski and the Dan Jones trilogy: War and Peace. Just ugh. I started the book in 2024. It was my attempt to read more novels and to read novels by non-Americans. The first third of the book was tough to get through but I just figured or hoped it was going to get better. When I determined to just finish the damn thing, I was rewarded with the middle third. The action during Napolean’s invasion captivated me. To read fictionalized but probably realistic accounts of how different people experienced such turbulent times was…captivating. Unfortunately, the final third to quarter was as difficult to slog through as the start. The clear shift in voice or intention of the book’s end was quite jarring to me. I know this is one of the masterpieces of literature, so I cheerfully accept most of the blame for not fully appreciating it but c'est la vie. My desire to read accounts of people’s lives during turbulent times was fortuitously led to the Essex Dogs trilogy by Dan Jones. I discovered Dan Jones when I was casting about for books about the Middle Ages and enjoyed his book on the Magna Carta. More about Jones’s historical work below, but he is a really good storyteller so I was immediately intrigued by his fictionalized account of a group of “ordinary” mercenaries–the Essex Dogs–during the reign of King Edward III and his military campaigns in France that resulted in his victories at Crécy and Calais (among others). All three books were just remarkable in the texture to life they provided for the people who lived and died at the whims of powerful people with fragile egos and a value system (i.e., chivalry/knighthood) that cared little for the majority of the population. The other novel that I listened to that I can’t recommend enough is Percival Everett’s James, a reworking of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the slave James. The reading was incredible and the story even more so.
And that brings me to my third general category of reading for the year which was an obsession with the history of post-Roman, pre-Renaissance Europe. I spent a good part of 2024 listening to Mike Duncan’s “The History of Rome,” a 179-episode podcast, which ended in the year 478. I remained intrigued by the story of the empire breaking apart and curious how that transitioned into the very fractious and numerous centers of power that existed for the next millennia. The very best book of the period I completed was the audiobook of Barbara Tuchman’s, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. A predecessor to Dan Jones, a non-academic historian that was masterful at telling a story, Tuchman’s account of the 1300s was mesmerizing. It also made clear two things. First, that thousand year period had so, so many twists and turns that no one, two, or twenty books can adequately describe what happened. While there is truth to the notion that the same thing could be said about any millennia in human civilization, the Middle Ages just seem so chaotic with so many different centers of power and culture that it’s of a different magnitude than other periods of time. Relatedly, the other thing that this period impressed upon me is the idea that violent conflict is endemic to human nature. I know there is a book on this topic arguing about how the past century or so has broken that unbroken change of conflict, but until I read it, I feel like I understand the world a little better with that idea as a cornerstone of my analysis.
To briefly say a few words about some of the other books I read, I did read the first book of Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich and while there are clearly some similarities to the current moment and Trump’s fascist tendencies, there are some stark differences. I did read a few American histories, Miles’s history of Detroit, the role of southern slave owners in foreign policy in the nineteenth century, and books by four of my graduate school professors (Hartigan-O’Connor, Olmsted, Kelman, and Taylor), all very good. Although I have spent some time studying the West it’s mostly been focused on California and less on the Southwest, so I appreciated the hole in my knowledge Nelson’s book has started to fill. My last “book book” was Gorman’s biography of the French artist Henri Matisse during World War 2. (I categorized my books as either paper–book books–electronic books, and audiobooks.) During my master’s program at CSU Sacramento, I took a seminar on Readings in Modern Europe that was organized around World War 2 with most of the books on resistance movements during the war, so I have been interested in that idea ever since. The one book that I finished that I was disappointed in was Rossellini’s examination of “western identity.” It started well with a good laymen’s explanation of Greek philosophy and how they understood the self, but after that it was literally just a general, historical account from the Romans to the Renaissance. I stuck with it because I kept hoping it would get better and back to the promised topic, but it never did.
Speaking of sticking with it, I did have 6 DNFs. Half of them because they were just serial descriptions of Medieval conflicts and the rising and falling of this king or that (almost every one of which were named Henry, Philip, Richard, or Edward). Two of them were novels, Mikhail Bulgakov’s, The Master and Margarita, which was recommended to me by someone I was explaining my difficulty in getting through War and Peace but still wanted to read something by a Russian author; and the second one was…Moby Dick. I know, I know, it probably doesn’t reflect well on me that I did not enjoy Twain, Tolstoy, or Melville, but I just couldn’t get past chapter 42 (out of 135). To incriminate myself even a bit more, I’ll also mention I have only made it to chapter 20 (out of 86) of Eliot’s Middlemarch although I am not quite ready to concede defeat on that one just yet.
So that’s a summary of my reading in 2025. I have quite a few books in mind for 2026 and will try to at least match, if not slightly surpass, my 2025 book body count.
E-Books
Robert Tombs, The English and Their History.
Abigail Markwyn, Empress San Francisco: the Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Anthony Everitt, The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World’s Greatest Empire.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich.
Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.
Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.
Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones.
Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.
Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century.
Barbara W. Tuchman. The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I.
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages.
Ingrid Rossellini, Know Thyself: Western Identity from Classical Greece to the Renaissance.
Book Books
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values.
Kathryn Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler.
Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.
Tera W. Hunter, To ’joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War.
Christopher Gorman, Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France.
Audiobooks
Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty.
Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.
Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist.
Dan Jones, Essex Dogs.
Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
Percival Everett, James.
Dan Jones, Wolves of Winter.
Dan Jones, Dan. Lion Hearts.
David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele,The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.
Did Not Finish
Lindsay Powell, Marcus Agrippa: Right-Hand Man of Caesar Augustus.
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita.
Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power, Europe: 1815-1914.
Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World from the Consecration of Constantine to the First Crusade.
Mark Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.