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



Amazing and inspiring!
As I have come to expect, Peter, your efforts are often surprising and always inspirational. Aristotle can wait another year or so...