Reading Ideas for 2025
What I'm currently reading, what I plan to read
We’re slightly past the point of New Year’s resolutions, but it is still worth getting some ideas down on paper to help commit to them. Reading lists and new book ideas are always popular, and I’ll include within this some academic/journal reading as well - big, important papers that are worth mulling over and considering the implications of.
What I’ve recently finished reading
Homer and his Iliad, by Robin Lane Fox
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, by Alex Ross
The Other Renaissance: From Copernicus to Shakespeare, by Paul Strathern
Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning at the Birth of the Renaissance, by Hugh Bicheno
Runaway Horses, by Yukio Mishima
What I’m currently reading (listening on audiobook included)
The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century, by John Mauceri
George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, by Andrew Roberts
Stalin’s War, by Sean McMeekin
Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall, by Frank Brady
What’s on my reading list for this year
Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy
The Gallic War - Caesar
Daily Life of the Aztecs - Jacques Soustelle
The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved - Steven Mithen
Frederick the Second - Ernst Kantorowicz
(Re-read) The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science - Armand Marie Leroi
The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology - Roger Osborne
Essays by Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne
The Deluge - Adam Tooze
The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought - William R. Everdell
Debussy: A Painter in Sound - Stephen Walsh
I’d like to find or be recommended good books on the American Revolution, British constitutional history, the immediate post-Alexandrian world, Zulu history, early influences of Buddhism and Hinduism into Europe and Elizabethan sailors/age of exploration. All suggestions welcome.
Two papers that I need to read carefully and digest are:
The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans by Iosif Lazaridis et al, which seems to be a landmark paper integrating genetics and linguistics on the question of Indo-Anatolian and the Indo-Europeans
Earliest modern human genomes constrain timing of Neanderthal admixture by Arev Sumer et al. This paper details a hard time window on Homo sapien intermixture with Neanderthals that has profound implications for Asian and Australian palaeo-history.
I’ll write something about both of these, since they cover two of the most popular and researched areas of genetics and prehistory - the Indo-Europeans and the Neanderthals.
I always enjoy hearing about what other people are reading, so please do drop in the replies anything you’ve enjoyed. Podcast/Youtube channel/Substack recommendations are also welcome.
Since you are reading Roberts' George III book atm 'The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding'; Eric Nelson; Harvard University Press; 2014 would complement it more than adequately I think.
What do you mean by post-Alexandrian, the man; the city; or the era?
Robin Lane Fox (Advised on Oliver Stone's 'Alexander' and you can spot him charging with the Hetaroi at one point!) is your man for Alexander the Great; I'd use his bibliography for pointers to the immediate Diadochid era. For the wars of the Diadochi: 'Dividing the Spoils'; Robin Waterfield; OUP; 2011 and ITS bibliography for the wider aspects of the era too. Anything by John D. Grainger: Waterfield particularly notes 'Seleukos Nikator: Constructing a Hellenistic Kingdom'; Routledge; 1990, and 'Hellenistic Phoenicia'; OUP; 1992.
There are later tomes of course; but 'The Age of Reconnaissance'; J. H. Parry; Berkley: University of California Press; 1981 is a good overview of Europe's discovery of the rest of the world.
'The Origins of the English Parliament 924-1327'; J. R. Maddicott; OUP; 2010 for our constitutional origins and Dr. David Starkey is indispensable for the topic in general. See 'David Starkey Talks'; his YouTube.
'The Washing of the Spears: The rise and fall of the Zulu Nation'; Donald R. Morris; Konecky Konecky; 1994. There is a lot of mythology around the Zulu though, so it is a topic for reading widely and critically on and taking with a large pinch of salt.
Thanks very much for these recommendations! One more suggestion on the American Revolution — “The radicalism of the American Revolution” by Gordon Wood. He is a great writer and emphasizes how the Revolution was fundamentally democratic in nature. The founders tried to restrain these forces w a republican constitution / “republican virtue,”
but they failed and their govt was already undermined by the early 1800s