2025 Reading - History

January 11, 2026 at 2:30 PM

At the end of 2024 I started an in-person history book club in order to motivate myself to read a bunch of history books. We went through 7 books over the course of the year (one was a DNF due to the book being terrible), covering a diverse set of topics.

The book club has been a success - I had no idea if anyone would sign up and now we’re up to about 140 members (of which maybe 20 or so are active), and it did indeed get me to read lots of books that I otherwise would not have read. All the meetings had at least 5 attendees and there seems to be a core of regulars. I’ll write another post sometime with more reflections on the book club, but here I’ll run through the books we read and my brief thoughts on each one.

Everything Under the Heavens - Howard W. French: Not bad and not too long, but not the best choice for your first book on Chinese history, which it was in my case. This book surveyed China’s relationship with most of its neighboring countries, in each case going back in history and then working up to the present to show how events of the past shape the current relationship. It did a fine job of what it was trying to do, but was more focused on specific, modern issues and how they came to be rather than primarily being a history book, which made it an imperfect choice for my book club.

The Three Emperors - Miranda Carter: Covered the lives of King George V (plus a lot of Victoria and Edward VII), Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II, all of whom were of similar age and reigned as monarchs in their countries during the onset of WWI. The most interesting theme was the way that Britain, Germany, and Russia differed in how much ‘real power’ their monarch had at the beginning of the 20th century, and the problems this caused, particularly in Russia where there was a very weak parliament and the tsar had mostly unchecked power. The book went into extensive detail on the minutiae of each monarch’s life which I found tedious. I would also recommend reading some other primer on the buildup to WWI before reading this book. This book gives an interesting viewpoint for analyzing WWI, but focuses mainly on the lives and relationships between the monarchs and other government officials and I found it hard to connect these to the larger context.

Inventing Japan - Ian Buruma: This was a non-book club selection that I chose because I was looking for an introduction to Meiji-era Japan. It's a short book and does indeed give an introduction to Meiji-era Japan, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I think it assumed more background than I had, so a lot of it went over my head. The writing style was a bit odd as well. I don’t anti-recommend it, but you may be better off trying something else if you’re interested in the subject.

SPQR - Mary Beard: A broad survey of Roman history and an excellent book. It covered a large timespan (which was what I wanted, being new to Roman history) and was both accessible and thorough. She did an excellent job of differentiating between “what we know definitely happened,” “what we think might have happened or have only a fuzzy picture of,” and “what is pure speculation / legend.” In addition to being a great book on Roman history, it was also a great book for learning how we learn about antiquity at all, the information sources we rely on for this era (sometimes we’re trying to infer a great deal from a fragment of an inscription on a tombstone) and the pitfalls ancient histories can have (written to legitimize the current ruler and/or denigrate prior rulers).

The Anarchy - William Dalrymple: A history of the British East India Company and how it gradually amassed control over all of India. Interesting throughout, it spent more words than necessary on a number of different battles, but the broad story was well-told. One interesting idea was that, indirectly, the American Revolution had a major impact on Indian history by prompting the British to change tactics in India to avoid a similar outcome. I was also surprised at how independently the East India Company acted. I had the impression that the colonization and conquest of India was a project of the British government, and that the EIC was just a vehicle for accomplishing it, but it seems that really was not the case in the beginning. The EIC raised armies, built cities, established local governance, often while actively hiding its actions from the British government. If anything, the government was holding the EIC back for the first hundred years or so.

The Silk Roads - Peter Frankopan: A very broad history of much of the world, with a loose focus on the Middle East and the way the dominant trade routes (“silk roads”) of different eras shifted the balance of world power. This is a great choice if you’re new to reading history, given its breadth, though that also means it doesn’t go especially deep on any one topic. The 'Silk Roads' framing of the book was forced and unnecessary, but didn't really detract anything. One thing that stood out to me was the way that (1) demand for prized goods from India and China led to sprawling trade routes between Europe and Asia, (2) control of those trade routes concentrated wealth in the most powerful cities along the routes, and (3) desire to circumvent those ‘middlemen’ and gain direct access to eastern goods spurred innovation which eventually irrevocably upended the world order. Countries like Spain and Portugal began the 'Age of Exploration' because sea routes were the only way for them to gain unrestricted access to eastern goods. And then England followed suit and leapfrogged them, likewise forced by their powerful neighbors to innovate further. The accidental discovery of the Americas and the enabling technological innovations had the side effect of elevating those countries to power at a pivotal moment in history.

[DNF] Debt -David Graeber: Utterly incomprehensible. I think I disagree with most of the author’s ideas but it’s difficult to say for sure because I don’t think he is himself clear on what his ideas are and the book doesn’t have any kind of logical structure. I voted for this book in our book club poll thinking it would be some kind of history on the evolution of debt (I know, how foolish of me to think that of a book titled “Debt: the first 5,000 years”), but in reality it was a mashup of philosophy / political treatise / anthropology with only a bit of (dubious) history, and does none of those things well. I gave up about half way through. Everyone in my book club who had made significant progress on the book also thought it was terrible. Anti-recommend.

1776 - David McCullough: An excellent read to end the year, and the first American history we read for the book club. This was a notably different style of book from our other selections, focusing on a much narrower subject (the American Revolutionary War, specifically in the year 1776) and told mostly through first person accounts by prominent figures in the conflict. I was dubious for about 10 pages and then I was hooked, this was the most “can’t put it down” history book I read during the year. The book focused on the three major events of the war in 1776, the siege of Boston, the battles in and around New York, and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. I had not realized how dire the situation was at the beginning of the war. It really does seem that if not for a handful of very specific decisions (timely retreats, the Delaware crossing, Howe’s conservatism), Britain would have simply wiped out the Continental Army, forcefully suppressed the rebellion, and … who knows what history would look like from there.