2019 reading list

Last year I stole the idea of posting my readings from Tanner Greer’s fantastic blog The Scholar’s Stage.  This is basically the list of everything I read/listened in 2019. And they’re roughly listed (from memory) in order I read them. My favorite titles of the year are bolded. And I’ll include short comments to some titles. All the Russian works read in original (Yeah, I’m boasting).

Some book stats bellow. 

1. Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Gowers
   
2. The Portable Atheist by Christopher Hitchens
3. Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen
4. The Second World War by Antony Beevor
5. The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin
6. The Queen of Spades and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin
7. A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
8. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol
9. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
10. The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
11. Induction and Intuition in Scientific Though by Peter Medawar
12. Advice to a Young Scientist by Peter Medawar
13. Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction by Samir Okasha
14. The Stranger by Albert Camus
15. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
16. White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
17. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
18. The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer
19. 1984 by George Orwell
20. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel
21. Wild Life by Robert Trivers
22. Night by Elie Wiesel
23. We by Evgeny Zamyatin
24. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
25. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
26. What is Chemistry? by Peter Atkins
27. Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
28. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
29. A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
30. D-Day Through German Eyes by Holger Eckhertz
    Series of 5 interviews with the soldiers defending the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Apparently the interviews were conducted by the author’s father. I had a feeling of suspicion while reading this. So I tried to find out about the author. I couldn’t find anything. The book is published electronically and is popular on Amazon and Audible. From a little more sleuthing I found out that the same publisher has several other books on this genre—war memoirs from German soldier’s POV. Similarly there’s no info on the author of these books too. Since these books have a lot of good review on Amazon and Audible, I thought there must be reviews of these books by historians. Nope, none. These are scams. 
31. Origin Story by David Christian
32. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
33. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
34. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris by Ian Kershaw (vol. 1)
35. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw (vol. 2)
36. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
37. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
38. The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor
39. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
40. Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
41. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
42. Human Errors by Nathan Lents
43. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
44. Nazism 1919-1933 by Jeremy Noakes (vol. 1)
45. Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
46. The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams
47. 1491 by Charles C. Mann
48. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
49. Nutshell by Ian McEwan
50. A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine
51. What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr
52. Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
53. Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins
54. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
55. The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans (vol. 1)
56. The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans (vol. 2)
57. The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans (vol. 3)
58. The Double Helix by James Watson
59. The Trial by Franz Kafka
60. The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
61. The Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel
62. Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer
63. A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky
64. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
65. The Ethical Brain by Michael Gazzaniga
66. The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
67. The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg
68. SPQR by Mary Beard
69. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (vol. 1)
70. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (vol. 2)
71. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (vol. 3)
72. 80000 Hours by Benjamin Todd
73. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
74. Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
75. The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti
76. Factfulness by Hans Rosling
77. Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
78. The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan
79. The Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy
80. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
81. Success and Luck by Robert H. Frank
82. Genome by Matt Ridley
83. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
84. The Poverty of Historicism by Karl Popper
85. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
86. Salafi-Jihadism by Shiraz Maher
87. Leningrad by Anna Reid
88. Primates and Philosophers by Frans de Waal
89. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
90. Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges
91. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
92. The Cooperative Gene by Mark Ridley
93. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
94. How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman
95. A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man by James Joyce
96. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett
97. Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction by Bernard Wood
98. The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
99. Nonzero by Robert Wright
100. The End by Ian Kershaw
101. William Blake: Collected Poems by William Blake and W.B. Yeats (ed.)
102. Atheism: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Baggini
103. Neanderthal Man by Svante Paabo
104. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
105. The World as I See It by Albert Einstein
106. The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
107. To Explain the World by Steven Weinberg
108. Liquid Rules by Mark Miodownik
109. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
110. Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene by Bart Ehrman
111. A History of Warfare by John Keegan
112. The Unreal and the Real by Ursula K. Le Guin
113. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
114. The History of the Bible by Bart Ehrman (The Great Courses)
115. After the New Testament by Bart Ehrman (The Great Courses)
116. The Next Pandemic by Ali Khan
117. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
118. The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
119. The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey
120. The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot by Bart Ehrman
121. Sketches from a Hunter’s Album by Ivan Turgenev
122. The Historical Jesus by Bart Ehrman (The Great Courses)
123. First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev
124. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
125. Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev
126. The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
127. Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski
128. Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski
129. The Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski
130. Baptism of Fire by Andrzej Sapkowski
131. The Tower of the Swallow by Andrzej Sapkowski
132. Lady of the Lake Andrej Sapkowksi
133. Poems in Prose by Ivan Turgenev
134. Did Darwin Get It Right? by John Maynard Smith
135. Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen
136. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
137. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
138. The Language of the Gene by Steve Jones
139. Cuckoo by Nicholas Davies
140. Areopagitica by John Milton
141. War as I Knew It by George S. Patton
142. Hannibal by Patrick Hunt
143. The Dark Ages by Charles Oman
144. Being Human by Robert Sapolsky (The Great Courses)
145. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
146. The Anglo-Saxon World by Michael Drout
147. Rabid by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
148. In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland
149. Brain Droppings by George Carlin
150. The Early Middle Ages by Philip Daileader (The Great Courses)
151. The High Middle Ages by Philip Daileader (The Great Courses)
152. The Late Middle Ages by Philip Daileader (The Great Courses)
153. The Medieval World: Kingdoms, Empires, and War by Thomas F. Madden
154. The Medieval World: Society, Economy, and Culture by Thomas F. Madden
155. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney tr.)
156. The Age of the Vikings by Anders Winroth
157. A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrisch
158. The Norsemen by Michael Drout
159. New Testament History and Literature by Dale Martin (Course)
160. How the Crusades Changed History by Philip Daileader (The Great Courses)
161. The Rise of Rome by Gregory Aldrete (The Great Courses)
162. The Roman Empire by Gregory Aldrete (The Great Courses)
163. From Jesus to Constantinople by Bart Ehrman (The Great Courses)
164. 1066 by Jennifer Paxton (The Great Courses)
165. The Rise of Rome by Anthony Everitt
166. Icons of the Iron Age by Susan Johnston
167. Celts and Germans by Timothy Shutts
168. Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
169. The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell
170. The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell
171. And Yet by Christopher Hitchens
172. The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen
173. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
174. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens
175. Augustus by Adrian Goldsworthy
176. Augustus by Anthony Everitt
177. The History of Christianity in the Reformation Era by Brad Gregory
178. Third Thoughts by Steven Weinberg
179. Science in the Soul by Richard Dawkins
180. Two Cheers for Anarchism by James S. Scott
181. Such, Such Were the Joys and Other Essays by George Orwell
182. Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman
183. The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch
184. Foundation by Peter Ackroyd
185. Classics: A Very Short Introduction by Mary Beard
186. The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Kelly
187. Marx: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer
188. Masterpieces of Medieval Literature by Timothy Shutt
189. Political Philosophy: A very Short Introduction by David Miller
190. Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction by Colin Ward
191. From Jesus to Christianity by Thomas Madden
192. Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Blackburn
193. Myth: A Very Short Introduction by Robert Segal
194. Heaven or Heresy by Thomas Madden
     Madden makes the silly statement that the tradition of ‘separation of church and state’ was started by Constantine. He makes this blanket statement so in the rest of the course he can blame everything on the state part of the equation. You can’t simply divide church and state in the middle ages, because Churchmen were one of the biggest feudal lords and owned a lot of land—they *were* the state. And almost all actual statesmen themselves were very religious, in some cases outdoing the priests in their piety.When talking about torture by inquisition, he literally claims that ‘torture worked for getting the truth’. How does he know this, is beyond me. He tries to blame the ‘state’ for all the executions because it was the ‘state’ that actually carried out the killing. But why the state killed those people? Isn’t that because inquisition condemned them first? It’s like saying that courts are not part of the justice system and putting all responsibilities on jails!
195. The Age of Henry VIII by Dale Hoak (The Great Courses)
196. The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis
197. The Story of Medieval England from King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest by Jennifer Paxton (The Great Courses)
     
198. The Poetic Edda (Jackson Crawford tr.)
199. The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc
     What is a heresy? Belloc defines it as ‘the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.’ The five heresies chosen and treated by Belloc are Arianism, Islam (Belloc sees Islam as modified Christianity), Albigensianism, Protestantism (Reformation) and the last one is unnamed but vaguely defined as modern secularism, science, capitalism (all of which he considers offshoots of The Reformation) which he abhors. He believes that heresy by definition is simplification and rationalization of the orthodoxy and leads to degeneration. He puts this like a physical law. He uses the word rationalism as derogatory.
     From this follows that all creeds/heresies lead to degeneracy and hence are bad. The problem is that he views Catholicism as the original Christian creed or orthodoxy. This is factually wrong. Disproven by Bible itself. There wasn’t such thing as Catholic orthodoxy at the beginning. There were many interpretations of scriptures and one of these won on political/sociological/demographic grounds and got recognized as orthodoxy.
     Another problem is that he views Catholic Christianity as the true and original creed, and all derivations and deviations from it are ‘simplification and rationalization’ that lead to degenerate creeds. But then you could turn the tables around and say that Christianity is itself ”simplification and rationalization’ of Judaism, so is as a degenerate a religion as any heresy.
200. The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Luke Johnson
201. The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction by Amanda Podany
202. Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith
203. Revelations by Elaine Pagels
204. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Book Stats

# of books read: 204
# of pages read: 63,758

• average book length: 312 (though this is affected by the inclusion of courses which have 0 page count)
• 10 out 204 books by female authors (that’s a really big disparity)