Year in Reading, 2025

Started off with a really good pace this year, only to run aground for a few months due to travel and other interruptions. Still, finished 38 different books, including some ones I really enjoyed and bolded.

Some additional thoughts at the bottom, and I also post impressions/reviews throughout the year on Goodreads.

  1. Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis by George Makari
  2. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-1956 by Fredrick Logevall
  3. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning
  4. Years of Peril and Ambition: US Foreign Relations, 1776-1921 by George C. Herring
  5. No Pasaran: Matt Christman’s Spanish Civil War by Matt Christman
  6. Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca by Alexander Star (and others)
  7. The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy by Stephen M. Walt
  8. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital by Michael Heinrich
  9. Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy
  10. Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Keith Gessen (re-read)
  11. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty
  12. The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood (re-read)
  13. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner
  14. Abolitionism: A Very Short Introduction by Richard S. Newman
  15. Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening, and Our Best Hope by Jedediah Purdy
  16. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America by Harry L. Watson
  17. Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong by Sanford Levinson
  18. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 by Eric Hobsbawm
  19. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker
  20. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester
  21. Ideology and US Foreign Policy by Michael H. Hunt
  22. The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre
  23. The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences by Quentin Skinner (and others)
  24. Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham
  25. Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s by Howard Brick
  26. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction by Quentin Skinner
  27. History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold
  28. The Cold War & the University: Towards an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years by Various Authors
  29. Why Not Socialism? By G.A. Cohen
  30. The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets by Matthew Connelly
  31. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Ralph Trouillot
  32. All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison (re-read)
  33. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State by Joseph R. Strayer
  34. The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them by Aziz Rana
  35. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp
  36. The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding by Osita Nwanevu
  37. Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States by Jonathan Levy
  38. The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution by Sheldon S. Wolin

I spent several months of the year reading (off-and-on) one of the most impressive books of the last few years: Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind. Wildly underdiscussed despite the scope and relevance, this is a book that asks why the US Constitution came to be venerated across the political spectrum—and discussing the wide swath of American history where it pointedly wasn’t. This seems kinda dry and limited, but Rana pulls in the burgeoning imperialism of the late 19th century, efforts to shore up the state after World Wars 1 and 2, and more. Ultimately the Cold War consensus is what enshrines constitutional veneration as a moderate anchor, shunting everything else under the blanket term of “populism.” Very highly recommended!

I tackled several other books asking similar questions about the democratic (and pointedly anti-democratic) elements of the US, and enjoyed most of them. They are also much more approachable and focused! Osita Nwevanu’s The Right of the People was one highlight, along with Jedediah Purdy’s Two Cheers for Politics. Both make a strong case for the merits of democracy, pointing out how the United States has fallen well short for most of its history (and even now is dominated by counter-majoritarian forces working to enshrine hierarchies). Both lovely reads, with Osita’s especially relevant for being released just earlier this year. Sanford Levinson’s Our Undemocratic Constitution is a little older but more thorough on the structural flaws of the constitution, and interesting to see which problems have really flared up since publication.

Another brilliant and sprawling book that took me a few months was Jonathan Levy’s The Ages of American Capitalism. Here too the title is a little misleading: he’s interested less in giving a purely economic history than in examining the political economy of the US as it grew and evolved. It means some of the sections can be a bit particular and idiosyncratic, but an approach like this is necessary to coherently discuss a country where the fundamental economic and political process could change radically over just fifty years. Again, a book that’s almost too daring to fit into the discourse.

Other books covering US history I enjoyed this year include Liberty and Power by Harry L. Watson, a slick history of the rise of Jacksonian politics; The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner, on the evolving public opinion on slavery and Lincoln’s track just a little bit ahead (but sometimes foolishly short where he would end up); and the first volume of the excellent-so-far JFK biography by Fredrick Logevall, which gets us up to 1956 and will supposedly only require one more upcoming volume.

While I am becoming pretty well-read on American history at this point, there are large swaths of European history where most of my knowledge is either high-school or incidental osmosis from other subjects. Trying to corrrect that, I started Hobsbawm’s four volumes of history, really enjoying the first volume (The Age of Revolution) before getting sidetracked by ancillary reading on the subjects mentioned. Planning to return to his other volumes in 2026!

One that really surprised me was Chris Wickham’s Medieval Europe, a shockingly-compact book for a millennium’s worth of history of a dozen countries. He doesn’t have the time (or interest) to go beat-by-beat for everything, so he focuses on the structural commonalities, differences, and changes over the time period—pulling in specific events as useful illustrations. I found it tremendously fascinating, informative, and useful for understanding the period, but it is the exact opposite of pop history.

The final thrust of reading this year was getting somewhat back into philosophy, starting with Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a fun book that historically contextualizes a lot of western philosophy and examines the ongoing preoccupation with representation. (And I don’t mean contemporary demographic representation here but a way more fundamental “this picture represents the world.”) Rorty’s argument is if we ditch the preoccupation with representation, we can neatly resolve (or dissolve) a lot of the fundamental philosophical disagreements that have driven continental and analytical philosophy over the last few centuries. He did other great work afterwards but this was the big book that got him on the scene.

Katrina Forrester’s In the Shadow of Justice was another book that understood philosophy as deeply shaped by the historical context—in this case, political philosophy by the currents and shifting needs of the Cold War. Forrester’s big question is how John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice had such an immediate and titanic effect on political philosophy that, like the quip about Plato’s Republic, the vast majority of subsequent work was a commentary on or rejoinder to his system. She’s very similar to Aziz Rana’s Constitutional Bind in being very well-written but also dense with ideas and implications. Both found me constantly bouncing back to the end-notes to find referenced works and avenues of inquiry.

My goals for 2026? Double-down on European history, keep chugging along with everything else, and actually read some fiction again! Anything more specific would be hubris, as the toddler’s veto continues to rule my daily routine. But on the other hand, raising her is the most important thing I will ever do; I just need my own brain food to balance out Peppa Pig, Daniel Tiger, and other didactic animals.

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