Books read 2025

I only managed to read 30 books this year, for various reasons.

Keys from the Golden Vault (1)

A Dungeons & Dragons book containing several smaller heist-style adventures. Some are more interesting than others (one even features a train!) but overall these are a good addition to a DM's possibilities, and I could see myself running most of them.

Lucy Holland, Song of the Huntress (2)

A sequel of sorts to Sistersong, set in Ine's England of Saxons and Britons. Elegantly written and touching on important themes. It took me a while to get into this one, but it's a more polished work than Starborn or its sequels, and has a more straigtforward narrative core than Sistersong.

Mick Herron, Slow Horses (3)

A well-constructed thriller with plenty of twists and turns. If I had a complaint, it'd be that Hassan's story requires quite some suspension of disbelief – but still this is the best spy novel I've read in a long while.

William Urban, The last years of the Teutonic Knights (4)

Old-school dynastic and military history, but useful for the purpose for which I was reading it: to understand how Poland and Lithuania came about. It was also handy for understanding more about the Teutonic Knights themselves and how all of this related to the Council of Constance.

Jared S. Klein & Artūras Ratkus (eds.), Studies in Gothic (5)

A collection of essays on the Gothic language from a variety of perspectives. Some more exciting to me than others, but there’s clearly much more to be said about this fragmentarily-attested Germanic language!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Das kleine Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poesiealbum (6)

Last time Goethe was on this list I wasn't kind to him, but I do like a good poem about how nice nature is. Only a little book.

Karlos Arregi & Andrew Nevins, Morphotactics: Basque auxiliaries and the structure of spellout (7)

I'm not inherently that interested in Basque auxiliaries, but this book is an unusually detailed presentation of a Distributed Morphology architecture with unusually broad coverage, thus avoiding the somewhat ad-hoc adoption of theoretical alternatives that bedevils the DM literature. It's full of inspiring ideas like cross-modular structural parallelism and the Generalized Reduplication formalism.

Mick Herron, Dead Lions (8)

Sequel to Slow Horses, and just as good. I had a bit of a reading slump in April and May, but this roused me from it.

Mick Herron, Real Tigers (9)

Not as good as the previous two, but still a lot of fun. Lovely tense set-piece at the end.

Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories (10)

Picked this up at the bus stop, and a ticket for a performance of the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in 1996 fell out. Wonder who and what the story was? Anyhow, Chekhov's stories are short and sweet, and particularly good when dealing with the effects of power and money on people and how they are treated over time.

Bertolt Brecht, Gedichte (11)

Brecht is better known as a playwright than a poet, and it's odd to read his full-throated defence of Marxism-Leninism. But there are some great moments, like his lines on the Weimar constitution, and the "Staatsgewalt", which comes from the people, but where does it go?

Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 3rd edition (12)

I had never read this book cover-to-cover before, and it's increased my thinking that Saussure is radically misrepresented in much of the literature that invokes him. He also has some views that are straight-out bizarre from a modern perspective, e.g. on the relationship between phonetics (a historical science, for him) and phonology.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien/Die Sonette an Orpheus (13)

These poems have an oddly dreamlike quality to them, as if they consisted of words completely without denotation but full of connotation, stacked prettily together. Reading them was a strange experience.

Arnaldur Indriðason, Verborgen im Gletscher (14)

An Icelandic crime novel about a murdered man discovered preserved in a glacier. Dark and well-constructed.

Lindy Brady, Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain (15)

A little book about multilingualism during the Old English periods. It's surprisingly out of date as regards the literature on Celtic influence on Old English, and isn't always clear what sort of multilingualism - whether at the individual or societal level - is in question in any given case. But I learned about various cool examples of multilingual texts, anecdotes and phenomena from it.

Jakob Leimgruber, Singapore English: structure, varieties, usage (16)

This 128-page book is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it gives a great overview of the history and social status of Singapore English. On the other hand, the title would lead one to expect an overview of the linguistic properties of Singapore English, and this is done incredibly cursorily: the chapter on phonology AND the lexicon runs only to six pages, and other than a detailed discussion of discourse particles, the chapter on morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics isn't much longer. The author's main interest is clearly in how we conceptualize "varieties" and how linguistic features relate to social or cultural variables, and he mentions "explanatory force" a lot - but it's hard to imagine any situation even in principle that his indexical model, while undoubtedly descriptively powerful, couldn't cover. Thought-provoking as regards the theoretical status of "varieties", but overall the title oversells what the book provides.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, 2nd edition (17)

Not so much a book that makes the case that nation-states are socially constructed and a modern phenomenon (which they obviously are; Anderson takes this for granted from earlier work). Rather, it does what it says on the tin: it reflects on why and how nationalism spread when it did. The weakest chapter is on patriotism and racism, where Anderson denies a link. Here his analysis is somewhat naive, it strikes me, both in that it operates with a surprisingly simplistic notion of racism (attitudes, not structures) and in that it relies on taking people at their word (there are various reasons people might not want to express their hatred for other nations and races explicitly). I'm still with the people he criticizes, like Nairn and Hobsbawn, in taking a somewhat dimmer view of nationalism.

Agatha Christie, 4.50 from Paddington (18)

The third train-themed Agatha Christie. An excellent setup, with all the usual ingredients.

Percival Everett, The Trees (19)

A book that starts out promising to be a murder mystery set in the American South, but ends up veering in a very different direction without losing the tone. Challenging without being overtly judgemental, it's not for the faint of heart.

Jeremy Black, A history of railways in 100 maps (20)

First and foremost this is a coffee-table book. The maps are not large enough, for the most part, to be used or read, despite the large format. But it's a nice collection anyhow, with a variety of maps from all over the world, from the beginnings of railways to their present and future.

Herman Hesse, trans. Stanley Appelbaum, Demian (21)

The free bookshelf next to the bus stop continues to deliver, this time on a Hermann Hesse I hadn't read. This is a lovely, thought-provoking book with no clear single moral message.

Tonio Schachinger, Echtzeitalter (22)

Surprising to me that a book can both be about Age of Empires 2 (sort of) and also win the Deutsche Buchpreis. A coming-of-age novel, really.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, trans. P. A. Motteux, Don Quixote, part 1 (23)

An important book to read, and eye-opening as regards the origins of many ideas and idioms (such as "tilting at windmills"). That said, this rather old translation by Motteux (just after 1700) treads an uneasy line between tedium and hilarity. It has its moments of brilliance - for instance on the barber's bowl - but many pages that are not easy to follow.

Jacob Grimm, Über seine Entlassung (24)

In 1837, Grimm was one of seven professors in Göttingen to refuse to swear an oath to the new king, on the grounds that the latter had (illegally) annulled the 1833 constitution. As a result, he lost his job and was forced to leave the country. In the light of current political events, this is an interesting read - in particular on the role of universities in society, and on the tension between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing (especially given the relatively comfortable sinecures of us tenured academics).

Susan Ee, Angelfall (25)

I needed something a bit pulpier to read after the last six, and this fit the bill: a classic postapocalyptic girl-meets-angel adventure packed full of clichés.

Andreas Hölzl, A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond: An ecological perspective (26)

This is an impressive overview of question formation – hopefully a blueprint for future studies of this kind focusing on other linguistic areas. Although it's of necessity rather taxonomic, the right balance is struck between detail and generalization. I'm less convinced by the ecological framing suggested by the subtitle, which seems to function as window-dressing, but perhaps that's overly cynical of me.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (27)

There are points I can get behind in this book; certainly the warning against naive ideas of progress and teleology, the idea that happiness is found in the here and now, and the pushback against those who judge the mores of previous ages anachronistically. But overall I came away from this one with a bad taste in my mouth. For Nietzsche, history is a disease, and those who know too much about it – or who see knowledge of history as an end in itself – are feminized, infantilized intellectuals without culture, whose interior and exterior are in conflict. Real history is das Ewig-Männliche "the eternally masculine", and the true goal of history is to guide great men to great deeds; Nietzsche is contemptuous of the masses. As well as being distasteful, it's ironic given that Nietzsche himself was plagued by illness and that all of his achievements emerged from an academic bubble (he was Wackernagel's predecessor as chair of classical philology at Basel).

Bridget Collins, The Binding (28)

Excellent modern Gothic fiction.

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (29)

For the first three quarters of this little book I found it difficult to discern much of a point, and certainly little that would pass for a coherent argument. But the last quarter was interesting. Barthes explicitly borrows the notion of the unmarked from linguistics; this is what he means by "degree zero", as the indicative is to the subjunctive and imperative. Writers seeking to free themselves from literary convention will seek a "writing degree zero", but will ultimately find themselves frustrated in this goal, as new conventions will be created in the process.

Mick Herron, Spook Street (30)

More psychological than its predecessors, going deeper into the minds of key characters. Still a very good spy story.