According to Goodreads, I made it through a whopping 175 books this year! A good mix of fiction, and both topical (for me) and non-topical non-fiction.

For non-dueling related non-fiction, some of the biggest hits for me included "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser, "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America" by Gilbert King, "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome" by Mary Beard, "The Holocaust: A New History" by Laurence Rees, and "The Run of His Life : The People versus O.J. Simpson" by Jeffrey Toobin. All of them were quite excellent, and I would highly recommend to anyone looking for an interesting read!

For fiction, I read "The Three Body Problem" trilogy. The first book was excellent, and although it lagged a bit at points in the sequels, all in all it was a great series that I would encourage others to check out. Also I finished James Clavell's 'Asia Saga', with "Noble House" and "Whirlwind", which were both great in my opinion, and "Rat King" and "Gai-Jin" which were pretty good. Also read "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman, which is just as great as the film! A must read IMO!

For dueling related works, hardly will list them all, but I would especially recommend "Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms" by Roger B. Manning, "Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters" by Steven Stowe, and "Violence And Culture In The Antebellum South" by Dickson D. Bruce Jr. I would also especially note "Pistols at Dawn: A History of Duelling" by Richard Hopton which was hardly the best thing I read, but I did find it to be a solid pop history for anyone wanting a readable general history.

As for the worst? I have a penchant for cheap paperpack thrillers when I need a 'palate cleanser' between dank tomes. "Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo" by Jack Higgins... dear god was that horrible. Higgins is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but maaaaan. That one was the. fucking. worst. I would also single out "Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide" by Eric Bogosian for a lackluster and uninspired book that barely delivered on the nominal topic, mostly a third-rate history of the Genocide, and "The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and Deadly Cabinet Rivalry" by Giles Hunt for being really just a pair of shitty biographies with a brief mention of the actual duel.

I just read for fun, so my list isn't too long or serious, but I think every book on here was recommended by someone on this sub and they've all been excellent. So thank you everyone for your recommendations!

2017

• Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War by Thomas G. Andrews
• The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 by Chris Wickham
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
• Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity by Alaric Hall
• Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon,
• Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians by Gilbert L. Wilson

I'm currently partway through:

• Ancient Egypt in Africa edited by by David O'Connor and Andrew Reid
• Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 by Robin Fleming
• Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris by Eric Jager

2018

• One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark by Colin G. Calloway
• Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael McDonnell
• The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast by Andrew Lipman
• The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan

This was a bit of a crazy year, personally and politically, so my reading reflected that insanity as I tried to learn more about my area of interest, as well as the greater processes influencing the world. Here are the greatest hits...

2017

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Resendez is the single best readable volume currently out there exploring Native American slavery. Read this book.

The Name of War: King Phillip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore is one I should have read far earlier. The first half moves a little slow, but then the themes start to come together in an amazing way.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Kendi was very informative, immensely readable, and at times darkly funny. I don't forgive the marketing department who subtitled it "the definitive history of racist ideas" while ignoring the complex history of racism against Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, but I'll get over it.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Hochschild was the most recent read. I kept wanting it to be an ethnography because I'm such an anthropologist. Again, I'll get over it.

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America by Wendy Warren was a great discussion of African slavery in New England that, like most books on early American slavery, discuss Native American slavery in the introduction and then don't mention it again. Scholars of Native American and African slaveries really need to talk more.

2018 Reading List

Ready Player One because I need to read some fiction.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal

American Slavery, American Freedom

A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek

To my shame I have not read as much as I should have. Many of the books I have picked up, I have not finished. To be fair, I was finishing my thesis, then doing field work, then writing a book chapter based on my thesis for publication, and writing reports to submit to INAH.

I have been meaning to finish these books and will try to do so this upcoming year.

2017

• The Teotihuacan Trinity: The Sociopolitical Structure of an Ancient Mesoamerican City by Annabeth Headrick - Completed

• Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall - Almost complete

• Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica edited by Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk - Three-quarters complete

• Correspondence Analysis and West Mexico Archaeology: Ceramics from the Long-Glassow Collection edited by Charles Roger Nance, David S. Verity, Jan de Leeuw, Kathleen Prado, and Phil C. Weigand - half complete

• The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico by Angélica Jimena Afanador Pujol - half complete

• Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America edited by Matthew Looper - half complete

2018

Besides the partially read books above, these are the primary books I want to tackle. On top of these are a slew of journal articles related to a possible project at Los Guachimontones I need to read before 2019.

• Olmec archaeology and early Mesoamerica by Christopher Pool

• Cooperation and Collective Action: Archaeological Perspectives edited by David Carballo

• The sounds and colors of power by Dorothy Hosler

• Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas by James A. Doyle, Joanne Pillsbury, Juliet B. Wiersema, and Patricia Joan Sarro

• At home with the Aztecs by Michael Smith

• The Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Environment of the Marismas Nacionales by Michael S. Foster

Late to the party, but what the hell? It was the Year of Slavery for me, when I got much more serious about studying slavery instead of just saying it's what I studied because it was quicker to say and explain in casual conversation than "nineteenth century politics surrounding slavery". That started early, but didn't really kick off until summer.

1. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
2. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction
3. Southern Slavery and the Law
4. Arguing About Slavery
5. Hounded (fiction, not especially good but pretty fun)
6. David Rice Atchison of Missouri: Border Politician His only biography.
7. Gateway to Freedom The Underground Railroad, with a focus on New York.
8. Jacksonian Antislavery (Largely unconvincing)
9. Slavery at Sea
10. Year of Meteors Unexpectedly pop history of the election of 1860.
11. At the Hands of Persons Unknown My first lynching study. Felt it was poppy at the time but since learned that the ebook version just didn't have the footnotes and remedied that.
12. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
13. The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South Like the only book on this and ancient. The forward to the second edition begrudgingly conforms to then contemporary practice of capitalizing "Negro", which was new at the time.
14. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition More a collection of research notes and essay fragments than a book, but still good.
15. Slavery & Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South Too interested in a question I find mostly empty.
16. Southern Honor
17. The Peculiar Institution I started at the very beginning.
18. The Frontier Against Slavery Not as illuminating as hoped. Seminal work read decades later problem, though.
19. North of Slavery
20. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
21. American Slavery: 1619-1877 Largely read as a balance in anticipation to the following two.
22. The Political Economy of Slavery
23. Roll, Jordan, Roll This was an incredible slog.
24. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850
25. Jefferson vs. Hamilton Kind of a waste. Basically a dual biography of one man I don't care much at all about and one I already read a better biography of.*
26. The Lies of Locke Lamora Good but not a lot of desire to read the sequel.*
27. The Wages of Whiteness
28. The Slave Ship: A Human History
29. White Over Black
30. This Vast Southern Empire Gets better the further in you get, largely in the course of getting more conventional.
31. Stamped from the Beginning It's an ok first book for someone on the subject and parts of it are really good, but I caught a couple of errors and the marketing copy oversells it so badly on top of that that I came out less than impressed despite wanting to like it.
32. Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South The ethnography sections are great. The actual argument? Slim.
33. The First Emancipation
34. Black Slaveowners
35. To Purge This Land With Blood The John Brown biography.
36. The Power to Die Slavery & suicide together make for grim reading.
37. Slavery and Social Death
38. Ar'n't I a Woman? So good.
39. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

I hope to bust fifty this year, but I'm not off to a great start. For a while I was reading two chapters a day consistently, but that fell apart in late summer. The non-fiction skimjob is difficult for me to do consistently.

I have a terrible pattern of starting books and not finishing them but these are the ones I’ve more or less read cover to cover or actively plan on finishing:

2017

Fiction:

• Heretic by Bernard Cornwell

• Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

History:

• Voyage to Disaster by Henrietta Drake-Brockman

• Islands of Angry Ghosts: Murder, mayhem and mutiny by Hugh Edwards

• Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's terrifying circumnavigation of the globe by Laurence Bergreen

• Hell's Gates: The terrible journey of Alexander Pearce, Van Diemen's Land cannibal by Paul Collins

• The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz

Short Osprey books:

• The Irish Wars: 1485-1603 by Ian Heath

• Elizabethan Sea Dogs: 1560-1605 by Angus Konstam

• Dutch Armies of the 80 Years' War: 1568-1648 by Bouko de Groot

• Imperial Armies of the Thirty Years' War: Infantry and Artillery by Vladimir Brnardic

• The Army of Gustavus Adolphus: Infantry by Richard Brzezinski

• Matchlock Musketeer: 1588-1688 by Keith Roberts

“Currently reading":

• Quest for Blackbeard: The true story of Edward Thache and his world by Baylus C. Brooks

• Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland by Paul Zumthor

• The World of Rembrandt: 1606-1669 by Robert Wallace

• The Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef: The true story of the wreck of the Dutch East India ship Zeewyk by Hugh Edwards

• Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily life on the Indies fleets in the sixteenth century by Pablo E. Perez-Mallaina

• The Persian Expedition by Xenophon

Very overly ambitious reading list for 2018

Fiction:

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

• Oroonoko by Aphra Behn

History:

• The Tailor-King: The rise and fall of the Anabaptist kingdom of Munster by Anthony Arthur

• Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean by Barry Richard Burg

• The Rosicrucians: The history, mythology, and rituals of an esoteric order by Christopher McIntosh

• Tulipomania: The story of the world's most coveted flower & the extraordinary passions it aroused by Mike Dash

• The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson

• And Their Ghosts May Be Heard by Rupert Gerritsen

Primary sources:

• Germania and Agricola by Tacitus

• Galley Slave by Jean Marteilhe

• The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, thirty-two years a wanderer amongst the Aborigines of the then unexplored country round Port Phillip by John Morgan

• The Loss of the Wager narratives of John Bulkely and John Byron

Other:

• Rosicrucian Trilogy: Modern Translations of the Three Founding Documents translated by Joscelyn Godwin et al.

• Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard

• The Kybalion by Three Initiates

• New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and The Isle of Pines by Henry Neville

Selections from my list for 2017:

• The Phoenicians: the Purple Empire of the Ancient World - Gerhard Herm; translated by Caroline Hillier
• Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy - Ian W. Toll
• Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfisher
• American Rifleman: A Biography - Alexander Rose
• Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser (historical fiction)

Currently reading:

• Enemy North, South, East, West: A Recollection of the "Lost Battalion" at Mortain - Robert Weiss

Planning to read in 2018:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond [I must be one of the last people on the planet to read this book]
• Victory at Mortain: Stopping Hitler's Panzer Counteroffensive - Mark J. Reardon
• GI: The US Infantryman in World War II - Robert S. Rush
• Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles series (historical fiction, 3 novels)
• Blackwing - Ed McDonald (historical fiction)
• more Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser (historical fiction; I have already purchased Royal Flash and Flash for Freedom!)

I am a man of limited means: several of the above books were or will be checked out from my local public library, and the rest were bought used from Amazon or Thriftbooks; none are particularly expensive.

Edit: corrected format errors. My thanks to u/Georgy_K_Zhukov.

I'm a student, so these books are a mix of stuff I read for class and stuff I read because I was interested. I think the best book I read in 2017 was Postwar; it's just fantastic. I've been really interested in 1930s Spain lately so I'm working on The Spanish Republic and the Civil War at the moment.

2017

• The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914, Philipp Blom
• Inventing Japan: 1853-1964, Ian Buruma
• Cartucho & My Mother’s Hands, Nellie Campobello
• The Russian Revolution 1917-1932, Sheila Fitzpatrick
• The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, Helen Graham
• A History of East Asia, Charles Holcombe
• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Tony Judt (audiobook)
• Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, Peter McPhee
• A Concise History of the French Revolution, Sylvia Neely
• Doves of War: Four Women of Spain, Paul Preston
• American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Alan Taylor (I didn’t read it cover to cover but I did read 17 of 19 chapters, so close enough to consider it read I suppose)
• Buddhism in Chinese History, Arthur Wright

2018

• War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Doris Bergen
• For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, Frederick Brown
• Twentieth Century Europe: Politics, Society, and Culture, Spencer Di Scala
• Everyday Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, Ronald Fraser
• The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939, Gabriel Jackson
• To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, Ian Kershaw
• Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944, Robert Paxton
• The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge, Paul Preston
• Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge
• The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s, Eugen Weber
• Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Eric Weitz

It was the first year in a long time I didn't have to read materials specifically for school, but I also have been overseas away from most of my books. Still got through some interesting things:

• Alderney, Fortress Island: The Germans in Alderney, 1940-1945 by T.X.F. Pantcheff (1982)

• Breakaway: From Behind the Iron Curtain to the NHL--The Untold Story of Hockey's Great Escapes by Tal Pinchevsky (2012)

• Federal Practice: Exploring Alternatives For Georgia And Abkhazia edited by Bruno Coppieters et al (1997)

• Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia by Alexander Cooley (2012)

• The Making of the Georgian Nation (second edition) by Ronald Grigor Suny (1994)

• The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen (2012)

• The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin by Stephen Lee Myers (2014)

• The Red Machine: the Soviet Quest to Dominate Canada's Game by Lawrence Martin (1990)

• The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists by Tarik Cyril Amar (2015)

• Russian Azerbaijan, 1905 1920: The Shaping of a National Identity in a Muslim Community by Tadeusz Swietochowski (1985)

• Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia by Alfred J. Rieber (2015)

• They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny (2015)

• Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him by Donald Rayfield (2005)

• Transcaucasian Boundaries edited by John F.R. Wright et al (1995)

• Tsereteli a Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography by W.H. Roobol (1976)

So first I'm surprised I got through 15 books; certainly didn't feel like I was going roughly one every month. And a bit of a mixed list there, no one dominant topic. Have to say my favourite though was The Red Machine by Martin: it has been something I've been wanting to read for years (and have written about it in answers here before), so was glad to finally do so, and it didn't disappoint. The worst was easily Federal Practices, in that it is heavily misleading (it hardly talks about Abkhazia and Georgia, and instead goes over political theory regarding federations, in a very dry and boring manner), and not at all what I was looking for (though glad I only paid like $5 for it). The coming year I'll continue to go through my list of books (mainly PDFs, until I get back to my stash at home), which remains a rather random mix of things.

I've been interested in the early 19th century presidents. So reading "A Country of Vast Designs" by Robert Merry. It's a biography on the political life of James K. Polk. Perhaps one of our most consequential one-term presidents. ( I believe George H.W will earn himself a spot towards the top of the best single term POTUS list.) I read H.W Brands book on Andrew Jackson. Talk about consequential.

Edit: I understand Polk was elected in '44, more mid than early 19th century, but he comes from the time period in politics I've been interested in.

I'm currently reading "The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the 20th Century" by Francis Sejersted. Really interesting but sometimes can be a bit of a slog. How did these Scandinavian countries develop such a people friendly government and lifestyle. What is behind it. Can it ever happen in the US? This last bit seems ever more unlikely as I progress thru the text.