2020 Reading List

This is basically the list of everything I read/listened to in 2020. And they’re roughly listed in the order I read them. My favorite titles of the year are bolded (not all bolded titles equally favorite). And I’ll include short comments or excerpts to some titles. My lists for 2019 and 2018.

Some book stats bellow.

The Celtic World – Jennifer Paxton (The Great Courses)
Citadels of Power – Thomas Finan
The New Testament – Bart Ehrman (The Great Courses)
Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction – Robert C. Allen
Jesus, Interrupted – Bart Ehrman
The Triumph of Christianity – Bart Ehrman
Battling the Gods – Tim Whitmarsh
A.D. 381 – Charles Freeman
The Origin of Satan – Elaine Pagels
Forged – Bart Ehrman
Pax Romana – Adrian Goldsworthy
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
God’s Problem – Bart Ehrman
1177 B.C. – Eric H. Cline
Hadrian’s Wall – Adrian Goldsworthy
Confessions – Augustine of Hippo (Albert Outler tr.)
‘7. Still, dust and ashes as I am, allow me to speak before thy mercy. Allow me to speak, for, behold, it is to thy mercy that I speak and not to a man who scorns me. Yet perhaps even thou mightest scorn me; but when thou dost turn and attend to me, thou wilt have mercy upon me. For what do I wish to say, O Lord my God, but that I know not whence I came hither into this life-in-death. Or should I call it death-in-life? I do not know. And yet the consolations of thy mercy have sustained me from the very beginning, as I have heard from my fleshly parents, from whom and in whom thou didst form me in time–for I cannot myself remember. Thus even though they sustained me by the consolation of woman’s milk, neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts but thou, through them, didst give me the food of infancy according to thy ordinance and thy bounty which underlie all things. For it was thou who didst cause me not to want more than thou gavest and it was thou who gavest to those who nourished me the will to give me what thou didst give them. And they, by an instinctive affection, were willing to give me what thou hadst supplied abundantly. It was, indeed, good for them that my good should come through them, though, in truth, it was not from them but by them. For it is from thee, O God, that all good things come–and from my God is all my health. This is what I have since learned, as thou hast made it abundantly clear by all that I have seen thee give, both to me and to those around me. For even at the very first I knew how to suck, to lie quiet when I was full, and to cry when in pain–nothing more.
8. Afterward I began to laugh–at first in my sleep, then when waking. For this I have been told about myself and I believe it–though I cannot remember it–for I see the same things in other infants. Then, little by little, I realized where I was and wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I could not! For my wants were inside me, and they were outside, and they could not by any power of theirs come into my soul. And so I would fling my arms and legs about and cry, making the few and feeble gestures that I could, though indeed the signs were not much like what I inwardly desired and when I was not satisfied–either from not being understood or because what I got was not good for me–I grew indignant that my elders were not subject to me and that those on whom I actually had no claim did not wait on me as slaves–and I avenged myself on them by crying. That infants are like this, I have myself been able to learn by watching them; and they, though they knew me not, have shown me better what I was like than my own nurses who knew me.

9. And, behold, my infancy died long ago, but I am still living. But thou, O Lord, whose life is forever and in whom nothing dies–since before the world was, indeed, before all that can be called “before,” thou wast, and thou art the God and Lord of all thy creatures; and with thee abide all the stable causes of all unstable things, the unchanging sources of all changeable things, and the eternal reasons of all non-rational and temporal things–tell me, thy suppliant, O God, tell me, O merciful One, in pity tell a pitiful creature whether my infancy followed yet an earlier age of my life that had already passed away before it. Was it such another age which I spent in my mother’s womb? For something of that sort has been
suggested to me, and I have myself seen pregnant women. But what, O God, my Joy, preceded that period of life? Was I, indeed, anywhere, or anybody? No one can explain these things to me, neither father nor mother, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Dost thou laugh at me for asking such things? Or dost thou command me to praise and confess unto thee only what I know?’
Rubicon – Tom Holland
The Conquest of Gaul – Julius Caesar
The Civil War – Julius Caesar
Caesar – Adrian Goldsworthy
The best biography of Caesar.
Histories (or The Rise of the Roman Empire) – Polybius (Ian Scott-Kilvert tr.)
‘Now some of the writers who have reported this crossing of the Alps, through their desire to impress their readers with their descriptions of the wonders of these mountains, have fallen into the two vices which are the most alien to the spirit of history, by which I mean distortions of fact and self-contradictory statements. For example, they present Hannibal as a commander of unrivalled courage and foresight, but at the same time show him as totally lacking in judgement. Then elsewhere, since they can ﬁnd no other way out of the labyrinth of falsehood into which they have strayed, they introduce gods and the sons of gods into what is supposed to be a factual history. They show us the Alps as being so rugged and inaccessible that so far from horses and troops accompanied by elephants being able to cross them, it would be difficult for the most agile of infantrymen to get through, and at the same time they represent the country as so desolate that if some god or hero had not met Hannibal and showed him the way, his whole army would have been lost and perished to a man. Reports of this kind are typical of the two vices I have mentioned — they are at once false and inconsistent.
48. In the ﬁrst place, could anyone imagine a more improvident general or a more incompetent leader than Hannibal would have been if, ﬁnding himself in command of such a large army on which all his hopes for the success of the expedition were placed, he had not familiarized himself with the roads or the lie of the country, as these writers suggest, and had no idea of where he was marching or against what enemy, or indeed of whether the whole expedition was practicable at all? In other words, what these authors are suggesting is that Hannibal, who had experienced no setback to mar his high hopes of success, would have committed himself to a plan which not even a general who had suffered a total defeat and was at his wits’ end for a solution would have adopted, that is, to take his army into completely unknown territory. In the same way, their description of the desolation of the country and the extreme steepness and inaccessibility of the route is glaringly inaccurate. They have failed to bring to light the fact that the Celts, who live near the Rhone, have not once nor twice before Hannibal’s arrival, but on many occasions, and those not in the distant past but quite recently, marched large armies across the Alps and fought side-by-side with the Celts of the Po valley against the Romans, as I related in an earlier book. They have not even discovered that there is a considerable population which inhabits the Alps themselves, but in ignorance of all these facts, they report that some hero appeared and showed Hannibal the road. The natural consequence of this is that they fall into the same difficulties as the tragic dramatists, who all need a deus ex machina to resolve their plots, because they are based on false or improbable assumptions. Similarly, these historians have to fall back on apparitions of gods or heroes, because the foundations of their narrative are inaccurate or unconvincing. For how is it possible to build a rational ending on an irrational beginning?’
Twelve Caesars – Suetonius (Robert Graves tr.)
Late Antiquity – Thomas F.X. Noble (The Great Courses)
The Fall of Constantinople 1453 – Steven Runciman
Did Jesus Exist? – Bart Ehrman
Pompeii – Mary Beard
Lost Christianities – Bart Ehrman (The Great Courses)
The Secret History – Procopius
The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels
Constantine the Emperor – David Potter
Not just a detailed and critical biography of Constantine, but at the same time a great history of the late 3rd century and first half of the 4th century Roman Empire.
A History of Ancient Greece – Eric H. Cline (The Great Courses)
The Glory That Was Greece – Jennifer Tobin (course)
The Spartans – Paul Cartledge
Masters of Command – Barry Strauss
From Troy to Constantinople – Jennifer Tobin (course)
The Campaigns of Alexander the Great – Arrian
Alexander the Great – Anthony Everitt
Ten Caesars – Barry Strauss
The Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
Alexander of Macedonia – Robin Lane Fox (course)
Living History – Robert Garland (The Great Courses)
The Coddling of American Mind – Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
The Rise of Humans – John Hawks (The Great Courses)
A History of Ancient Rome – Frances Titchener (The Great Courses)
Carthage Must Be Destroyed – Richard Miles
1453 – Roger Crowley
In God’s Path – Robert Hoyland
Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
The Sea Wolves – Lars Brownworth
The Normans – Lars Brownworth
Persian Fire – Tom Holland
Athenian Democracy – Robert Garland (The Great Courses)
A Little History of Economics – Niall Kishtainy
The Story of the Bible – Luke Timothy Johnson (The Great Courses)
Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age – Jeremy McInerney (The Great Courses)
Classical Mythology: The Greeks – Peter Meineck (course)
Classical Mythology: The Romans – Peter Meineck (course)
The Persian Empire – John Lee (The Great Courses)
The Death of Caesar – Barry Strauss
The Trojan War – Barry Strauss
Turning Points in Medieval History – Dorsey Armstrong (The Great Courses)
Better – Atul Gawande
The Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande
The Greeks – Isaac Asimov
Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
Prehistory – Colin Renfrew
How Rome Fell – Adrian Goldsworthy
Basic narrative history of the Later Roman Empire. And doesn’t explain anything about the Fall of Rome. But a good picture of army and defenses of the Later Roman Empire. Two important points from the book:
1. It’s hard to estimate, precisely, the numbers of Roman Empire’s military. Because there was a big discrepancy between paper/theoretical compositions of military units of all sizes and the actual soldiers they had on the ground. So increase in number of military units doesn’t necessarily means an increase in number of soldiers. Military units might be increased to give jobs to more people, because of bureaucratization and corruption. People apparently held fake unit commander jobs in order to collect soldiers’ payments and provisions. Also the sizes of units may be smaller, even half of theoretical amounts.

2. Saying that Persian empire was equal to Roman Empire is a misjudgment. Even when Roman Empire disintegrated in the West, the Eastern part of the Roman Empire still was militarily superior to Persian Empire. Putting Persian Empire’s military might on the same level as Roman Empire’s is confusion of scale. After the Roman Empire, Persian Empire was the second great power. But that doesn’t mean that they were equal.
Peoples and Cultures of the World – Edward Fischer (The Great Courses)
The Fall of the Roman Empire – Peter Heather
Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction – Harry Sidebottom
Pagans – James O’Donnell
Thermopylae – Paul Cartledge
Skin in the Game – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin – Philip Larkin
Dynasty – Tom Holland
The Persian Expedition – Xenophon
The Black Swan – Nassim Taleb
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction – Roger Scruton
The History of the Church – Eusebius
Europe – Norman Davies
Homer: A Very Short Introduction – Barbara Graziosi
The History of Christianity – Luke Timothy Johnson
Being Mortal – Atul Gawande
The History of Rome – Livy (vol. 1)
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Мёртвые Души – Николай Гоголь (Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol)
Шинель и Другие Короткие Рассказы – Николай Гоголь (The Overcoat and Other Short Stories – Nikolai Gogol)
Пьесы и Петербургские Повести – Николай Гоголь (Plays and Petersburg Tales – Nikolai Gogol)
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
Essays – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Повести. Рассказы – Александр Куприн (Tales. Stories – Aleksandr Kuprin)
My favorite stories:
– White Poodle
– Olesya
– Wonderful Doctor (very short story)
– The Garnet Bracelet
The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000 – Paul Freedman (The Great Courses)
Introduction to Paleontology – Stuart Sutherland (The Great Courses)
The Mysterious Etruscans – Steven L. Tuck (The Great Courses)
The Greek Myths – Robert Graves
Introduction to Ancient Greek History – Donald Kagan (course)
The History of Rome – Livy (vol. 2)
Cities of the Ancient World – Steven L. Tuck (The Great Courses)
The History of Rome – Livy (vol. 3)
The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians – J.B. Bury
Hannibal – Theodore A. Dodge
The Ghosts of Cannae – Robert L. O’Connell
The History of Rome – Livy (vol. 4)
Legion versus Phalanx – Myke Cole
The Saga of the Volsungs – Jackson Crawford (tr.)
Tamerlane – Harold Lamb
Medieval Households – David Herlihy
Archaeology – Eric H. Cline (course)
Justinian’s Flea – William Rosen
Writing solely about Justinianic plague would make a short book, because we don’t have much information. We can’t make comparative demographic studies of different provinces of the Roman Empire and other regions. And it’s hard to study the impact of the plague precisely.

Because of the sparsity of information Rosen chooses to put the plague in the general context of the times. So he starts with Diocletian, goes through Barbarian Migrations, and gives a general history of Justinian’s rule. It’s very unsatisfying when reading about very big subjects, like The Fall of Rome, the Barbarian Migrations, etc. in a volume that treats those subjects superficially. It’s not his fault, his history of period is interesting enough. The problem is that these subjects are treated way better and more in depth in different volumes specifically devoted to the issues. I’d highly recommend Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Walter Goffart’s Barabarian Tides, and the works of Michael Kulikowski to get a handle on who the Barbarians were and how it all took place.
George Orwell – Michael Shelden (The Great Courses)
Hannibal – Harold Lamb
Hadrian – Anthony Everitt
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Theogony / Works and Days – Hesiod
A History of the Arab Peoples – Albert Hourani
The Odes of Horace – Horace, James Michie (tr.)
The Complete Poems – Catullus, Francis Warre Cornish (tr.)
The Georgics – Virgil
The Children of Odin – Padraic Colum
The History of Ancient Rome – Garrett Fagan (The Great Courses)
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve – Stephen Greenblatt
The Forge of Christendom – Tom Holland
Unearthing the Past – Jeffrey Martz (The Great Courses)
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller Jr.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
Epigrams – Martial, James Michie (tr.)
The Dream of Reason – Anthony Gottlieb
Julius Caesar – William Shakespeare (2nd read)
The Histories – Herodotus
Peloponnesian War – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
A War Like No Other – Victor Davis Hanson
Apology and Memorabilia – Xenophon
The Satyricon – Petronius
The Golden Ass – Apuleius
Agricola, Germania, Dialogue on Oratory – Tacitus
The Captive Mind – Czeslaw Milosz
Vindolanda – Adrian Goldsworthy (Vindolanda #1)
This Historical Fiction is set in AD 98, start of Trajan’s accession. The story circles around a Romano-British centurion who’s in charge of a border fort in Britain. He has a barbarian friend, who’s serving as auxiliary to the Romans as scout with his band of followers. It’s fun, they make a good duo. Fight in skirmishes to big battles. But most importantly Goldsworthy is a military historian specializing Roman Republic and Empire. He has several good books on Roman army. And also he’s written on British forts—archaeology and tablets. So you get a great picture of soldiers’ equipment, military composition, the style of fighting. And just their daily lives (what they eat, in what conditions they sleep and live, etc.). I really loved it.
The Encircling Sea – Adrian Goldsworthy (Vindolanda #2)
The Medieval World – Dorsey Armstrong (The Great Courses)
Brigantia – Adrian Goldsworthy (Vindolanda #3)
Lost to the West – Lars Brownworth
Empire – Paul Strathern
On the Shortness of Life, On Happy Life, and Other Essays (Essays, vol.1) – Seneca
Between the Rivers – Alexis Q. Castor (The Great Courses)
Ancient Mesopotamia – Amanda Podany (The Great Courses)
On Anger, On Leisure, On Clemency (Essays, vol.2) – Seneca
History of the Ancient World – Gregory S. Aldrete (The Great Courses)
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Charlemagne – Johannes Fried
Heaven and Hell – Bart Ehrman
The Middle Ages – Morris Bishop
Worlds at War – Anthony Pagden
The Old Testament – Amy-Jill Levine (The Great Courses)
The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
The Storm Before the Storm – Mike Duncan (2nd read)
Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations – Brian Fagan (The Great Courses)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience – Carl Sagan
Misquoting Jesus – Bart Ehrman
Daphnis and Chloe – Longus
Satires – Juvenal
The Monk – Matthew Lewis
The Myth of Andalusian Paradise – Dario Fernandez-Morera
More or less right thesis horribly argued for and presented. The author commits all the flaws he accuses his opponents of.
The Mongol Empire – Craig Benjamin (The Great Courses)
A History of Britain (vol. 1) – Simon Schama
Foundation – Peter Ackroyd (2nd read)
The Norman Conquest – Marc Morris
The Plantagenets – Dan Jones
Suicidal – Jesse Bering
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Magna Carta – Dan Jones
A Great and Terrible King – Marc Morris
The Greatest Knight – Thomas Asbridge
The Hundreds Year War – Desmond Seward
The Perfect King – Ian Mortimer
The Black Prince – Michael Jones
Henry IV – Ian Mortimer
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 – Nicholas Vincent
The Birth of Britain – Winston Churchill
Henry V – Ian Mortimer
Agincourt – Christopher Hibbert
A Brief History of the Normans – Francois Neveux
The Wars of the Roses – Desmond Seward
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Era of the Crusades – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
Crusaders – Dan Jones
Lords of the North – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #3)
Great Historical Fiction set during Alfred the Great’s reign. Story of England and Vikings, but mostly from the perspective of the English. The main character is a Saxon noble. When he was a kid, his father gets killed by the Vikings. And he’s taken as a slave. But the Viking family adopts him and he grows up like a Viking. There’s great TV series based on the novels that I highly recommend—The Last Kingdom on Netflix. Great book series and TV series.
Sword Song – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #4)
The Burning Land – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #5)
Death of Kings – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #6)
The Pagan Lord – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #7)
The Empty Throne – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #8)
Warriors of the Storm – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #9)
The Flame Bearer – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #10)
Strangers Drowning – Larissa MacFarquhar
War of the Wolf – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #11)
Sword of Kings – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #12)
What Money Can’t Buy – Michael Sandel
Ecclesiastical History of the English People – Bede
Four Princes – John Julius Norwich
Often we read histories of different countries/kingdoms/regions and somehow compartmentalize these histories inside our heads. Many interesting events took place at the same time across Europe and Asia, but most people fail to see the whole picture. When considering history of England in late middle ages or early modern times we don’t bring up the Ottoman Empire, because they didn’t have direct dealings with each other. But we forget that Ottoman Empire directly influenced the Holy Roman Empire in its geopolitical decisions, which in turn influenced the geopolitical situation in France and England. But I guess it’s easier for most of us to keep chronological histories of each country separately in our heads.
The Other 1492 – Teofilo Ruiz (The Great Courses)
Heart of Europe – Peter Wilson
Very good book buried within a larger and badly organized one. It’s not a narrative history, so I wouldn’t recommend reading it, if you are not familiar with general narrative history of the Holy Roman Empire. Some parts of the book, especially the parts on territories, identity, and practice/application of customs and laws were great. The rest is all over the place; without chronology and any in-depth explanations. And you’ll likely get swamped by the amount of information.
Italians Before Italy – Kenneth Bartlett (The Great Courses)
The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell
Evolutionary Psychology (Bolinda Beginner Guides) – Robin Dunbar et al.
Руслан и Людмила – Александр Пушкин (Ruslan and Ludmila – Aleksandr Pushkin)
The Crusades – Thomas Asbridge
Lord Foul’s Bane – Stephen Donaldson
Dreams of Terror and Death – H.P. Lovecraft
Tudors – Peter Ackroyd
The Life of Thomas More – Peter Ackroyd
Medieval Europe – Chris Wickham
Russia – Abraham Ascher
A History of Russia – Mark Steinberg (The Great Courses)
War Lord – Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom/Saxon Stories #13)
The Third Chimpanzee – Jared Diamond
Catching Fire – Richard Wrangham
Antony and Cleopatra – Adrian Goldsworthy
Rome and the Barbarians – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
Scipio Africanus – B.H. Liddell Hart
In the Name of Rome – Adrian Goldsworthy
Pagans – James O’Donnell (2nd read)
The Gods of Olympus – Barbara Graziosi
The Tudors – G. J. Meyer
The English and Their History – Robert Tombs
The Black Death – John Hatcher
The Children of Ash and Elm – Neil Price
Philip and Alexander – Adrian Goldsworthy
The Templars – Dan Jones
Lost Kingdom – Serhii Plokhy
The Year 1000 – Valerie Hansen
The Romanovs – Simon Sebag Montefiore
Peter the Great – Robert K. Massie
Forgery and Counter-forgery – Bart Ehrman
The Vikings – Kenneth Harl (The Great Courses)
Why they thought it a good idea to choose a professor who’s not an expert on Vikings to do a 36 part (18 hours) course on Vikings is beyond me. Great Courses has a poor record of managing the quality of their courses. The information density of the courses is too low. For example, these 3 lectures by Neil Price (who is an archaeologist of Viking age Scandinavia) on Vikings are more informative and convey a real understanding of Vikings than 18 hours of courses in Great Courses series. With Great Courses you get simple narrative and anecdotes. No examination, no arguments for or against, no systematic analysis of evidence (archaeology and texts), no historiography, presentations of theories and their criticism. Great Courses are only good at giving some basic structure and timeline, if you don’t know anything on a particular subject (here I’m talking only on their history courses). Imagine if Neil Price was chosen to give these lectures. Well you don’t have to. He has a great book on this particular subject, which I highly recommend.
Barbarian Tides – Walter Goffart
Probably the best book I read this year. Very detailed and critical. Goffart sets the theories of his opponents in their own words and goes point-by-point over them.
Alaric the Goth – Douglas Boin
Jesus – Bart Ehrman
Thucydides – Donald Kagan
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Sailing from Byzantium – Colin Wells
Герой Нашего Времени – Михаил Лермонтов (2nd read) (A Hero of Our Times – Mikhail Lermontov)
Тарас Бульба – Николай Гоголь (2nd read) (Taras Bulba – Nikolai Gogol)
Отцы и Дети – Иван Тургенев (2nd read) (Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev)
Записки из Подполья – Федор Достоевский (2nd read) (Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky)
12 Rules for Life – Jordan Peterson
Котлован – Андрей Платонов (The Foundation Pit – Andrei Platonov)
Двойник – Федор Достоевский (The Double – Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Детство. Отрочество. Юность – Лев Николаевич Толстой (Childhood. Boyhood. Youth – Leo Tolstoy)
Капитанская Дочка – Александр Пушкин (2nd read) (Captain’s Daughter – Aleksandr Pushkin)
A History of Christianity – Diarmaid MacCulloch

Book Stats

# of books read: 252
# of pages read: 78,346

average book length: 310p (though this is affected by the inclusion of courses which have 0 page count)
16 out 252 books by female authors (that’s a really big disparity)

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