2025 Readings

A Whole Lot of Books

In 2024 I read 95 books; although I didn’t think I’d ever top that, in 2025 I somehow managed to read 116 books (more than two a week and almost ten a month). The downside is that for various reasons I didn’t write my book on Aristotle, which I thought would absorb most of my energies. Instead I read a bunch of jazz biographies, historical tomes on American culture, some classic American literature, all the ancient Greek tragedies, philosophical treatments of various topics in ethics and aesthetics, and the usual smattering of poetry. Highlights were three original works of philosophy by Walter Kaufmann, three early novels by Willa Cather (my new favorite writer of fiction!), and wide-ranging explorations in music and aesthetics (especially Roger Scruton’s Beauty, the collected nonfiction of Albert Murray, and Ellen Dissanayake’s ethological analyses of art as a behavior in What Is Art For? and Homo Aestheticus).

What will 2026 bring? Because in the last few months I haven’t been emotionally inclined to fiction (these things come and go with me), I expect I’ll continue my research into music and aesthetics, which has been informing both my musical compositions and my reflections on artistic creation as a path to wisdom. I’m also excited to report that my best friend and I will soon start a pair reading of the Iliad and Odyssey in ancient Greek, which I’m expecting will be a time-consuming but richly-rewarding endeavor (no doubt focused initially on relearning Greek grammar and vocabulary as well as the subtleties of dactylic hexameter). The Homer project is highly relevant to the epic poem I’m slowly composing about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great, so I might also dive into my huge reading list of related works in history, philosophy, and poetics. Finally, for edification and amusement I’ll yet again read the essays of Montaigne, since I’ve started on them recently with much enjoyment and see no reason to stop.

History

• Bailyn - The Peopling of British North America

• Barzun - Classic, Romantic, and Modern

• Berlin - The Roots of Romanticism

• Butler - The Huguenots in America

• Dodds - The Greeks and the Irrational

• Din - The Canary Islanders of Louisiana

• Fischer - African Founders

• Fischer - Albion’s Seed (re-read)

• Fischer - Historians’ Fallacies

• Games - Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World

• Goodfriend - Before the Melting Pot

• Shorto - The Island at the Center of the World (re-read)

• Shorto - Taking Manhattan

Literature

• Aeschylus - Agamemnon (re-read)

• Aeschylus - The Eumenides (re-read)

• Aeschylus - The Libation Bearers (re-read)

• Aeschylus - The Persians

• Aeschylus - Prometheus Bound

• Aeschylus - The Seven against Thebes

• Aeschylus - The Suppliant Maidens

• Bogan - Dark Summer

• Cather - My Ántonia

• Cather - O Pioneers!

• Cather - The Song of the Lark

• Chevalier - Girl with a Pearl Earring (re-read)

• Cooper - Li Po and Tu Fu

• De Vere - Poems

• Euripides - Alcestis (re-read)

• Euripides - Andromache

• Euripides - Bacchae

• Euripides - Children of Heracles

• Euripides - Electra

• Euripides - Hecuba

• Euripides - Helen

• Euripides - Heracles

• Euripides - Hippolytus

• Euripides - Ion

• Euripides - Iphigenia among the Taurians

• Euripides - Iphigenia in Aulis (re-read)

• Euripides - Medea (re-read)

• Euripides - Orestes (re-read)

• Euripides - The Phoenician Women

• Euripides - The Suppliant Women

• Euripides - The Trojan Women

• Hardy - Late Lyrics and Earlier

• Hardy - Winter Words

• Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea (re-read)

• Hemingway - The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (re-read)

• Millay - Renascence and Other Poems (re-read)

• Millay - A Few Figs from Thistles (re-read)

• Rattigan - Separate Tables (re-read)

• Shakespeare - Sonnets (re-read)

• Sophocles - Ajax

• Sophocles - Antigone (re-read)

• Sophocles - Electra

• Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus (re-read)

• Sophocles - Oedipus Rex (re-read)

• Sophocles - Philoctetes

• Sophocles - The Women of Trachis

• Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (re-read)

• Twain - Adventures of Tom Sawyer (re-read)

• Wheatley - Poems

• Whitman - Leaves of Grass (re-read)

Music

• Ellison - Living with Music

• Gioia - How to Listen to Jazz (re-read)

• Gioia - The Imperfect Art

• Hajdu - Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn

• Isserlis - The Bach Cello Suites: A Companion

• Kelley - Thelonious Monk

• Murray - The Blue Devils of Nada

• Murray - The Hero and the Blues

• Murray - Stomping the Blues (re-read)

• Porter - John Coltrane

• Priestley - Mingus

• Rattenbury - Duke Ellington, Jazz Composer

• Schonberg - The Lives of the Great Composers

• Van de Leur - Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn

• Williams - The Jazz Tradition

• Woideck - Charlie Parker

Philosophy

• Arendt - The Life of the Mind

• Bommarito - Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life

• Bowie - Philosophical Variations

• Bronowski - Science and Human Values (re-read)

• Dissanayake - Homo Aestheticus

• Dissanayake - What Is Art For?

• Fox - I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein

• Hoffer - First Things, Last Things

• Hoffer - The Ordeal of Change

• Hoffer - The Passionate State of Mind

• Hoffer - Reflections on the Human Condition

• Kaufmann - Critique of Religion and Philosophy

• Kaufmann - The Faith of a Heretic

• Kaufmann - Tragedy and Philosophy

• MacIntyre - After Virtue (re-read)

• MacIntyre - Dependent Rational Animals

• Manent - Metamorphoses of the City

• Priou - Musings on Plato’s Symposium

• Rimas - Etudes on the Philosophy of Music

• Santayana - Reason in Art

• Santayana - The Sense of Beauty

• Sartwell - Six Names of Beauty

• Schiller - Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

• Scruton - Beauty

• Spinoza - Ethics (re-read)

• Szabados - Wittgenstein as Philosophical Tone-Poet

• Thoreau - Walden (re-read)

• Vallor - Technology and the Virtues

• Wittgenstein - Culture and Value

Various

• Brown - The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian

• Dudzinski and Frohoff - Dolphin Mysteries

• Kouwenhoven - The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What’s ‘American’ about America

• Motomi - Create Your Own Japanese Garden

• Murray - The Omni-Americans

• Viereck - The Unadjusted Man

• Waterson - The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (re-read)

• Yasumoro - Inside Your Japanese Garden

Dogprints, 2024-02-17, by Peter Saint-Andre