reading my way through this godawful year

 i've read only a couple of dozen books this year, when forty is more typical --- trumpistan 2.0 has taken its toll on my reading, along with a great many other things --- 

Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greates Crash in Wall Street History (2025)

Itohan I. Osayimwese, Africa’s Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (2025)

**Colin Woodard, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America (2025)

***Roger Luckhurst, Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead (2025)

*David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (2000)

*Robert Reich, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America (2025)

*Toby Wilkinson, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra (2024)

Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography (2007)

Eric H Cline, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations (2024)

***Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible: A Biography (2020)

*Rick Steves, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (2025)

**Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025)

*Edmund White, My Lives: An Autobiography (2006)

Mark Masterson, Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Homosociality, and Brotherhood in the Medieval Empire (2022)

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees, The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistence . . .  (2024)

***Michael Grant, The Roman Forum (1970)

*Roland Mayer, The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History (2025)

*Peter Fertado, ed., Great Cities Through Traveler’s Eyes (2019)

Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001)

**Eleanor Marraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (2024)

 *Randall Woods, John Quincy Adams: A Man for the Whole People (2024)

John Ruggiero, Hitler’s Enabler: Neville Chamberlain and the Origins of the Second World War (2015)

John Muir; William Fredrick Bade, ed., A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)

Anthony Sattin, Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (2022)