Books Read in 2025

While the cares of the world drew me away from my books, I had some time to read whole books in 2025.

Books vary widely in density and word count (and readers vary in how much attention they pay). I suspect that some people who claim to read very large numbers of books mostly skim them, and some definitely read novels and airport books which are designed for easy reading. Someone who reads a few things intensely is not necessarily reading less than someone with a novel-a-day habit. So I will not make a total, just a subtotal of each category. These posts are to help me remember the books of all sorts which I read in 2025, like Zotero helps me remember the academic articles I found.

I have noticed that in ancient world studies or arms and armour I read more chapters and articles, whereas I am more likely to read a whole book in something further from my areas of expertise.

Martial Arts (5)

Saxton Pope, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow (1923) https://www.archerylibrary.com/books/pope/hunting-with-bow-and-arrow/ The book which started the revival of archery in the United States. The writing is very modern with a lively style and lots of enthusiasm and details. His bows seem to be more like Victorian longbows than Mary Rose bows, with an unstrung length a bit less than his height and a reinforced, leather-padded place to grip the bow. Pope believes that before the 1800s “The bow and arrow was still more deadly than the gun.” when a mass of primary sources disagree. Americans who are not familiar with how the Anglos took over (“conquered”) California should read chapter 1 because it is very frank.

Elmer and Faris, Arab Archery (1945) I took very extensive notes on this and hope that it will be central to a future book. Rating:+

Latham, Saracen Archery (1970) Sadly hard to own.

Camillo Agrippa, Fencing: A Renaissace Treatise, tr. Ken Mondschein (Italica Press: New York, 2014) A whole book on what Fiore’s Posta Longa explains in a few words: all the tricks you can do when you extent your point and sword hand towards your partner and dare them to get past. Agrippa is disability-friendly (book 1 chapter 4, book 2 chapter 26). Agrippa’s four guards are not the four hand positions, quarta is not with the fingernails up and prima is not with them facing to the right. He seems to be the first writer to explain that bending forward at the waist (a hip hinge) lets you strike farther and keep your lower body safe although we already see this practice in sword-and-buckler play of the thirteenth century. He is honest that many masters teach similar fencing, and that his theory does not work very well for the sword in two hands or the sword on horseback. Agrippa’s engraver introduced the trope of the nude fencer which was copied by Fabris and Capo Ferro and inspired by ancient Greek art. But despite all the copperplates I have trouble understanding, dall’Agocchie’s clear prose it isn’t and it does not begin with basic actions then move to close play like Giganti. One reason might be that he is ambiguous whether you have a naked left hand, a dagger, or an iron-palmed glove for gripping the enemy’s blade. And he does not explore “what if they try to cut your sword hand since its extended forward and just protected by the cross?”

Giacomo di Grassi, Ragione di adoprar sicuramente l’Arme (1570) tr. W. Jherek Swanger (Lulu, 2018) link The 1594 translation has some flaws and is difficult for modern readers. di Grassi’s fencing is odd but his theory and descriptions of footwork are useful. Rating:+

Eliptony (4 + one short)

“Have you ever drawn intense scrutiny from a philologist?”

– with apologies to Charlotte J.

Russel Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (web edition 1997) This book covers some things that you need to understand to understand the United States, namely confidence men (a name invented in New York City!), people confused about the relationship between fiction and reality, and Southern California as a place of cultural ferment like Nisaba’s brewer’s vat. LRH would have loved social media. Miller tells the story of Jack Parsons’ death as dropped nito-glycerine, and he missed the full story of LRH’s misadventures in and off Australia after Pearl Harbour. Watch out for the reference to RAH as “one science-fiction writer, then an idealistic left-liberal” (chapter 5); on the other hand, Hubbard bought a country house in East Grinstad from the Maharajah of Jaipur after de Camp published “A Gun for Dinosaur” with Raj of Janpur. Many people told Miller that Hubbard had told them “if you want to make money, start a religion.” Those who remember the FTX crypto scam will be interested in a passage of chapter 10:

But while money was pouring in, it was also pouring out and there was no accounting, no organization, no financial strategy or control. ‘One day the bank manager called me,’ said (A.E.) van Vogt. ‘He told me Mr Hubbard was in the front office and wanted to draw a cashier’s cheque for $56,000 and was it all right to give it to him. I said, “He’s the boss.”‘

Terry Pratchett aficionados will enjoy chapter 15:

To become ‘clear’ was still the goal of every Scientologist, but it was proving an extraordinarily elusive one. New levels of processing were continually introduced at Saint Hill, each with the promise that it would result in ‘clearing’, only to be replaced by another level and yet more promises.

Mollie Gleiberman, “Effective Altruism and the strategic ambiguity of ‘doing good’,” IOB Discussion Paper 2023.01 (April 2023) https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:iob:dpaper:2023.01 A long article with very extensive bibliography on the question whether Effective Altruism had a neartermist wing focused on measurable reductions in global poverty and a longtermist wing focused on hypothetical future dangers, or was a meat-before-milk swindle in which neartermism existed to bring people into a social circle and and way of thinking which prepared them for conversion to longtermism. She makes a strong case that the founders of EA organizations thought that neartermist, empirical EA was just an excuse to get the rubes in the door. The one neartermist EA I used to know online seemed sincere but slightly clueless about the Internet Libertarians she was talking to. Rating:+

Tara Isabella Burton, “Rational Magic: Why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2023 https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic Rating:~

Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025) Pitched to someone with less education than me, but important core messages that automation is automation (and that digital ‘automation’ often means low-wage workers somewhere you can’t see). Rating:~

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, 2025) I strongly recommend this book if you need a memory palace to organize your thoughts on some of the Internet ideas which have exploded into the news since 2022 (and how they relate to ideas from the 19th century like cosmism and eugenics). Its a bit less scholarly than Nevala-Lee’s Astounding but still covers names and dates and social networks (Becker has met or traded emails and video calls with many of the principals and their critics, so its harder for him to be dispassionate). For practical purposes, its enough to know that much of the ‘AI’ industry and the ‘tech’ industry in the US are part of movements similar to Scientology or social Darwinism which dream of conquering the galaxy and see actually-existing human beings as resources for or obstacles to their iron dream. “It’s the flesh that dies; it’s flesh that can’t go to space. … So flesh must be discarded, if the fantasy is to be maintained.” (p. 144) Odd characterization of RAH on page 262. Rating:+

By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanith in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler, occasionally referred to as Schicklgruber, and he understood, with sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out.

H. Beam Piper, Space Viking (1962)

Ancient Near East (3)

Eckart Frahm, Assyria (2023) Many people should know how the Assyrian people who had one governed themselves with just a Steward of their god found themselves with kings using them as footstools. Assur as genius loci! Rating:+

Ian Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence (Pan Books: London and Sidney, 1985) Short trade book on the topic. A lot of people I see talking about the subject online would benefit from reading it, since it covers topics like Jesus mythicism (people have noticed that Paul’s celestial Jesus is not much like the flesh-and-blood Jesus of the gospels for a long time) and the hypothesis that much of the Old Testament was composed or edited during the Babylonian Captivity. Wilson’s favourite mythicist is George Albert Wells who lived until 2017, rather than the earlier Germans such as Bruno Bauer. You don’t need the latest and most detailed scholarship to get a grounding! Rating:~

Hyland, John O. and Khodadad Rezakhani, eds. Brill’s Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires. Brill’s Companions to Classical Studies: Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean World 9. Leiden: Brill, 2024. ISBN: 978-90-04-70821-1 (hardcover) Review coming

World History (9)

Louise Sylvester, Mark C. Chambers, Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds.), Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook (Boydell & Brewer, 2014) Rating:+

J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books: New York, 2022) Review https://www.bookandsword.com/2025/02/08/flipping-the-narrative-in-slouching-towards-utopia/

Ronald Ennos, The Age of Wood (Simon & Schuster, 2020) c/o Bastion Books

David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) I will post my review of this in 2026. Rating:+

Katherine Gordon, A Curious Life: The Biography of Princess Peggy Abkhazi (Sononis Press, 2002) A humane account of an ordinary life and its frustrations. Marjorie Mabel Jane Carter was informally adopted by a wealthy family in England, settled in Shanghai, and moved to Victoria when she got out of an internment camp. She never left except for travel. Rating:~

B.W. Robinson, Persian Drawings from the 14th through the 19th century. Drawings of the Masters (Shorewood Publishers Inc.: New York, NY, 1965) Rating:~

John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland (Manchester University Press: Manchester and NY, 1997) The old English army was born in the 1590s as Elizabeth’s Privy Council found themselves stuck in two wars overseas, one on the continent for the Protestant cause and one in Ireland for English imperialism. The Privy Council found ways to push the human refuse of an urbanizing England into the army, and recruit a few gentlemen to lead them overseas and officer them once they got there. All too many of those gentleman saw this as a business proposition, so if they had to skim off the payroll or sell supplies they would. Focus on institutions and logistics. Took very extensive notes. Rating:+

John Keay, The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexnder Gardner (Kashi House, 2017) An account of an American (?) adventurer who drifted out of Central Asia just in time to participate in the fall of the Sikh Empire and the rise of the Dogras in Jammu and Kashmir. Gardner loved to tell stories but he was a terrible writer and was usually too busy dodging Uzbek slavers to take notes during his explorations (indeed, he never mentions having a compass). Important practical lessons such that if you are not sure your son is ready to be king, appointing a trusted vizeer and making him promise to take care of your son as long as he lives does not ensure that your son will have a long and happy reign. I will have more to say about the Battle of Magnesia and the First Anglo-Sikh War later. Rating:+

Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight: An Armourer’s Album (Thomas del Mar Ltd.: Great Britain, 2025) The conclusion of the Armour of the English Knight series, this feels like the type of book that Capwell wants to write: intelligent and knowledgeable but without a full academic apparatus. This is as close to a general history of armour in the fifteenth century as he is likely to publish since he does not collect languages like he collects armour. I disagree that the subject of English armour is almost exhausted (p. 7), since Capwell has barely touched the armour of anyone except the few thousand wealthiest and most respectable warriors in England, or the brigandines, jacks, and open salets which those wealthy warriors wore in camp. Watch out for my academic review of AotEK volume 3 which has been in press for some time. Rating:+

Finance and Economics (1)

John Quiggin, Economics in Two Lessons (2017) An introduction to economics for the informed citizen. Quiggin signposts that he is building his book around opportunity costs, but quietly also builds it around the interests of workers rather than capital. He is also trying to give US citizens an alternative to the dubious economics pushed by their hard right and neoliberal ‘left.’ This leads him into some frustrating rhetorical choices, such as making general statements then giving only US examples (so are they supposed to be general claims, or is there an implicit “in the USA”)? We in most of the world are bombarded by confident statements that are purely based on the experience of US persons in the USA. Rating:+

Novels (15)

Andrea Camilleri, The Smell of the Night (2003) Rating:~

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996) Rating:+

Shannon Ali Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Harper Voyager, 2023) Rating:~

K.J. Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (2019) Discovered at the Greater Victoria Public Library. Turns Roman history in a British absurdist direction (Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett) by making everything a bit crazier than the original sources rather than a bit saner like an academic history. Rating:+

Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary Volume 14: Broken Wind (Hypernode Press, 2018) There is probably a blog post in the Schlockverse, Utah culture in the oughties, and plot structures where the tension falls apart at the climax. Rating:~

L.K. Fleet, Errant volume 1 (2022) A slow-burn romance about a swordswoman and a Manic Pixie Dream Girl actress slash trickster. Fun light entertainment. Rating:~

Vi Corva, Space Dragons: Luxorian’s Crew (2024) Disabled space dragon looks for a crew so she can carry out missions and live independently. Rating:+

Lawrence Watt-Evans, Dragon Weather (2020) Grimmer than his usual fare like the Ethshar novels, the start of a series. Rating:+

Ian Flemming, From Russia With Love (1957, this printing Pan Books 1963) Reminds me of Heinlein’s noir phase, thoroughly unremarkable. The fiendish Russians plan to reveal proof that an unmarried British reserve officer had sex with a foreign woman! Rating:~

David Henry Keller, “The Solitary Hunters” (Weird Tales, vol. 23 no. 1-3 1934) Rating:+

Lanna Michaels, I Transmigrated Into Cordelia Naismith!, Archive of Our Own (2025) https://archiveofourown.org/works/69390871 Feels like a Feminist version of the “Connecticut Yankee” type of story mixed with an Isekai. I should read the Miles Vorkosigan novels by Bujold one day (Cordelia Naismith was Miles’ mother). Rating:~

L. Sprague de Camp, Rivers of Time (Baen, 1993) The followup to the best story about a dinosaur hunt ever written. By the twilight of his career de Camp had learned to get paid twice by selling a story to a magazine, then collecting it and selling the book. Note how the story written for a book, “Crocamander Quest,” is the one with all the cussing, while the stories written for science fiction magazines have clean mouths. Growing up I wondered if these characters were larger than life, but since I left my home town I have met them all. The only difficult types who are missing are the crank who thinks he is a genius, the Nazi (trophy-hunting businessman Jim Swayzey probably qualifies), the petty criminal, the pathological liar, and the Big Shot with wandering hands and a creative approach to bookkeeping (one of the Fundamentalist pastors comes close). Hugh Prendergast and Clifton Standish seem to come from his time editing the works of Robert E. Howard and discovering that Howard fans tend to the fanatical. Rating:+

R.J. Barker, The Bone Ships (2019) Piratical conscripts ahoy, mateys! Very vivid setting with matriarchal society and exotic material culture but with the tired “ballistae as cannons, crossbows as muskets” trope. Rating:+

angoroth, Collapse Vignettes: Road Trip (Royal Road 2025) https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/141872/collapse-vignettes-road-trip Seven chapters were published when I read this.

Plays and Screenplays (4)

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta

Screenplay of “Blazing Saddles” (Mel Brooks 1974)

(schedule 2 January 2026)

Edit 2026-01-07: add Ancient Near East section from my notes. Added Henige which was missing from my notes.

Edit 2026-01-10: added Marlowe