What I Read In January: The Good, the Fine, and the Absolutely Awful
Are Any Authors Being Tossed into Volcanoes This Time?
Welcome back, and thanks for reading! While I’ve generally just done yearly book roundup over the past few years, I have noticed that many people seem to like these short reviews. So, inspired by Zoomer Historian’s recent article,1 I’ve decided to start doing monthly roundups of what I have read over the month, with short reviews of each one. The books are listed in chronological fashion. Enjoy! And as always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it. For those who want the best book on the list, it is the last one, #13, which I happened to read last in January. Listen to the audio version of this article here:
![[AUDIO] January Book Roundup and Reviews](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oLLR!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F186763599%2Fe80fa5b3-3a59-4e3f-8ca9-b29019a13ac1%2Ftranscoded-1770139645.png)
Before We Begin: Announcing a New Project!
I’m super excited to announce that I have started a YouTube channel called The Old World Show, in which I’ll do videos explaining the histories of the great men of the Old World, from colonial adventurers to lordly families. I’m planning series such as the First Families of Virginia, Ms. Astor’s New York 400, and the great peerage families of Britain. To begin with an exciting one, I’m covering the history of the White Rajahs of Sarawak! Check out episode 1 here, covering how he became a rajah. I’d really appreciate it if you followed the channel and liked the video:
1. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw
Last year, in an attempt to learn more about the American industrial oligarchy that existed during the Gilded Age, I read Nasaw’s Andrew Carnegie, as it is one of the few well-recommended general biographies of him. It was a bit dry but very informative, so I then found and read Nasaw’s The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, out of personal interest. I had high hopes, as Hearst is a fabulously interesting figure, and I was curious about the details of his business empire.
Those hopes were dashed entirely. Unlike Nasaw’s biography of Carnegie, which is dry but at least gets into the deep business details of how Carnegie built his steel operation from nothing, his biography of Hearst somehow manages to combine hundreds of pages of tabloid-tier personal details with utter dryness that makes it nearly unreadable. Unless related to some sort of drama or scandal, the business details of the Hearst empire are largely excluded in favor of Nasaw’s figure wagging at Hearst’s licentiousness and profligacy. One finishes the book thinking him purely a rake with a penchant for the spectacular, and forgetting the magnitude of the media enterprise he created.
There are a few good moments in this book, but overall, it is a total bore and pointless to read unless you want to repeatedly fall asleep while reading 700 pages of decades-old, tabloid-type details.
2. Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980 by Peter Baxter
As Zoomer Historian and I repeatedly mentioned in our recent podcast, there’s not really a good, general history of Rhodesia. Instead, nearly every book about the country is a combat memoir or recollection of life during the Bush War. Those are interesting enough, but generally more anecdote than history. There are some good histories of the Bush War itself—A Pride of Eagles is my favorite, though it focuses on the air force. However, even these are generally buried under the deluge of memoirs and memoir-type writings.
So, with that problem in mind, I turned to Peter Baxter’s Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980, hoping it would be a good general history of Rhodesia. It’s “fine”. Much of the information in it is good and of the sort rarely found in such a coherent narrative elsewhere. Baxter’s writing is solid, and he does a good job of not getting too caught up in the Bush War, to the exclusion of everything else.
That said, there are a few problems.
One is that he tends to focus on the political and diplomatic history of Rhodesia rather than the cultural and economic history. That was a major mistake. For one, diplomatic history is simply boring, as even diplomatic historian AJP Taylor notes in the introduction to his The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, and Rhodesia’s diplomatic and political history has already been covered in excruciating detail by JRT Wood.2
Additionally, people are largely drawn to Rhodesia not because of how it managed the negotiations in London but because it was a fabulously interesting outpost of empire, a place “more British than the British” and committed to the Old World way of doing things well after the age of communism and democracy had arrived. It is interesting because its culture and people, and the positive effects of that culture and the excellent sort of people who created it, are shown through the flourishing nature of its economy and society. That would have made a better foundation for Baxter’s book, yet, other than a few pages on the tobacco industry, it is almost entirely missing.
So, the book isn’t perfect and lacks much that could have made it better, while already being quite long. Still, it is as good as one can currently do if in the market for a general history of Rhodesia, and so it is still worth reading.
Read my full review of it here:
3. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes
As a male, I am fascinated by the Roman Empire. I also tend toward agreeing with J.C. Stobart’s thesis in The Grandeur that Was Rome that the Roman Empire was not a period of unremitting decay that followed the Republic, but rather a glorious period, particularly for average Roman citizens (as opposed to the Senatorial and equites elites), that lasted for centuries and remains one of the greatest triumphs in Western history. As Gibbon felt fully justified in putting it in Volume I of his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Indeed, though really it is those years from the ascension of Augustus to the death of Commodus that could be considered as that period, as the tyranny of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors didn’t really make life worse for average Romans.
In any case, it is that interest that led me to Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent by Kim Bowes, in which Bowes describes the life of the average Roman, mainly during the early imperial period. Immediately upon starting it, I got worried, as it is a very left-coded work, there are a few weird turns of phrase that only a leftist female academic would write. Yet worse, she cites Graeber—the author I think should be thrown into a volcano, with all his books. However, after about page 10, it gets really good, and this is one of my favorite books I read in January.
What makes it so good is that Bowes describes the general myths about the average Roman over the period of Roman history we tend to think of—roughly the mid-Republic to the death of Commodus—and shows what about those myths is true and isn’t true. Namely, she shows why the myth that they ate ~1700 calories a day is a misreading of Cato’s On Agriculture that is easily disproven by the ostrakon-based receipts we have recovered (they really ate closer to the number of calories a medieval peasant ate, at least 3,000 a day or more), how Roman life was generally more precarious at times for the average sorts than unremittingly terrible, and how their economic system functioned at a grand and day to day level. Everything from how debt worked in their world to what food they bought when they had spare cash is covered, and it really is quite interesting and well-written.
Generally, these histories that ignore the great men of history and focus on the “average” are caustic, as they are meant to be attacks on the great man theory of history and diminish our view of the greats. Bowes, however, doesn’t really do that. Her book instead fleshes out what life was like, which I think quite adds to other, more typical, histories of Rome rather than detracting from them. So, I wholeheartedly recommend this one.
4. Lost Causes by Richard Nichols
As Mr. Nichols and I did a whole podcast on his Lost Causes (watch below), I’ll keep it brief. The plot is well done, the story is quite fun and clever, I love the heroes and villains he chose for the storyline, and the inclusion of both a Rhodesian character and the IRA to show where egalitarianism, third worldism, and envy lead was quite clever. There’s a lengthy speech in it that does a fantastic job of summarizing the worldview of the “Resentfuls”, as my friend EM Burlingame calls them, and the dialogue is generally quite witty and fun. I quite enjoyed reading it, and think you will as well.
Listen to our podcast here:
5. Robert E. Howard: The Masterworks by Passage Press
I took a few days off from my normally more rigorous non-fiction reading schedule last month to indulge in some pulp fiction: the collection Passage Press put together of Robert E. Howard’s best short stories, a collection they called The Masterworks. There are some Conan tales, some Westerns, some zany fantasy tales…it’s a fun mix of a broad swathe of his work.
Some are better than others. The longest of the Western stories in Volume II is quite good, the others are “meh”, and there is a Conan tale oddly tossed into it. The Conan stories throughout the collection are hit or miss. The first story in Volume I, a non-Conan fantasy tale, was probably my favorite; the rest of the stories in it weren’t great. Volume III was probably the best collection overall, as I enjoyed all of them.
On one hand, many of them are childish tales, with the action and dialogue being cartoonish at best. Some do surpass that, however, and the ones that are good are absolutely engrossing and terrifically thrilling. Further, there is a strong political and historical undercurrent in the fantasy ones, as the essentially Aryan warrior Conan is battling strange demons, snake gods, and the like…which is more or less another fictional account of the existential Bronze Age fight between the Indo-Europeans and the demon-worshipping cultures they conquered. That drew me in and kept me engaged, as I appreciated the symbolism, particularly for having read the Paulos essay on the truth at the root of the Perseus myth, which made me better able to understand it.3 AJR Klopp’s novel on much the same subject is quite good, as are the non-fiction works of Robert Drews.
Overall, these stories are fun, but generally not much more than that. Still, as they were meant to be fun rather than educational, they hit the mark and are solid pulp fiction.
6. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
If you haven’t read all of Tom Wolfe’s novels yet, you need to stop whatever you are doing and read them. They are fantastic, probably the best American fiction of modernity, if not of our entire history. Twain gives him a run for his money, but Wolfe was less of a liberal, which is a major mark in his favor. Fitzgerald does as well, but his books are generally quite depressing, unlike Wolfe’s. Wolfe was also an alumnus of the same school as me, Washington and Lee, and was something of an eccentric dandy who detested the Civil Rights grifters…so I feel a special affinity for him.
In any case, I found a very good deal on some signed editions of his best works—The Right Stuff, A Man In Full, and Bonfire of the Vanities—at the end of 2025, and so enjoyed rereading them around Christmas. All three are excellent. A Man in Full is my favorite, as I’m from Atlanta originally, and he does a wonderful job of savaging both the city government, which often seems straight out of the Congo, and the Buckhead types, who are generally the American haute bourgeoisie at its absolute worst.
But the one I reread in 2026 was Bonfire of the Vanities, which is also quite fun. In it, Wolfe manages to savage the “masters of the universe” investment bankers of the 1980s, the Civil Rights hacks who control black politics in the city, the Jewish/Irish/Italian law enforcement apparatus and its desire to prosecute WASPs instead of black criminals, and the general politics of white liberals who hope the diversity tiger eats them last. He also roundly mocks the journalism apparatus of which he was once a part. It’s a very fun read, and Wolfe drives the knife deep, though with a somewhat lackluster conclusion.
I wholeheartedly recommend all of Wolfe’s work, and this is one of my favorites from his corpus.
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
If Wolfe was a critic of the New America that existed after the Second World War, particularly the finance and civil rights-driven monstrosity that was cobbled together out of the degeneration of the 60s and chaos of the 70s, Fitzgerald was the last novelist who captured the old civilization that had vanished by the end of the first third of the 20th century. His books show the characters involved in the waning days of the lost civilization, how their fecklessness cost them the world they loved, and what the world was like before high civilization died.
The Great Gatsby is not the best of his works, but it is a fun read. Unlike his earlier works, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, which profile some wretched upper-class types around for the death of the old America that came with the Great War, Gatsby is famously about the clash between old and new that came with the Roaring 20s and Jazz Age. It’s a bit more fun than his earlier and later work, and is very witty, but does seem to be lacking something, which is why it was reviewed poorly, on the whole, when it came out. I can’t say what that missing element is, but the book feels incomplete and unsatisfactory, which is its only real downside.
That said, it is a fabulously fun read and a classic for a reason. Tom Buchanan’s line about “The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this fellow Goddard” always makes me chuckle (Fitzgerald was having the not overly bright and often besotted Tom try and fail to give a reference Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color)4, and if you read it knowing that Nick is an unreliable narrator (track how frequently he gets drunk in the book versus how many times he says he has ever been drunk), Fitzgerald’s cleverness shines through better in this work than any other. So, I recommend it wholeheartedly, but know it is, in the end, unsatisfying, which perhaps was the point, given how it ends.
8. The Epistles of Seneca by Seneca
Something possessed me to order a bit of Greek and Roman philosophical works at the end of 2025. As I can’t stand philosophy, finding it a tiresome and tedious subject, ordering it was probably a mistake. That said, I did manage to work my way through some of it (only Plutarch’s Moralia remains of the ones I ordered), and was left primarily thinking about why I don’t like reading philosophy: it is boring, and I cannot help but think “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” the entire time while reading any of it, from Nietzche to Cicero.
Seneca’s letters were no different than the others in that regard. There are some clever lines—his one about being able to hold your liquor being a sign of vice rather than impressive virtue because it means you drink too much regularly, so you should just get too drunk occasionally, made me chuckle—and it’s obvious why it has lasted for about two millennia. But, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into it. Smarter sorts than me, perhaps, will have contrary opinions.
9. The Last Tycoon by F Scott Fitzgerald
The introduction to The Last Tycoon describes it as Fitzgerald’s best work, despite his having died suddenly in the middle of writing it, leaving it incomplete. That is ironic in a melancholic way, as the main character dying too young was to be one of the plot points, had he lived to finish it.
Reading it, I found the claim that it’s his best work entirely untrue. As it takes place sometime in the 30s, during the abominable FDR regime, all the sorts of people and lifestyles about which Fitzgerald had once written were largely dead and gone. The genteel lives of the old money American families had been generally upended by the Depression, inflation, and the extortionate taxes of FDR, so the sorts of scenes that lovingly characterized all of his prior works are missing. Instead, it’s about a movie producer surrounded by Hollywood Jews, who Fitzgerald evidently found quite distasteful and objectionable, living in the California of almost a century ago, back when it was still somewhat fresh but already a den of iniquity.
I suppose Fitzgerald does a fair job capturing the lifestyle of that world and those days, but the book just isn’t good. The plot is poor, the characters uncompelling, the story sad and frustrating without any real redemptive characteristics. He was dying of alcoholism when he wrote it, and, sadly, that shines through in the quality of his work. It is still probably worth reading if you like him as an author, but everything else he wrote is much better.
10. The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West by Paul Andrew Hutton
Much of what makes the American frontier so fascinating is that, while it existed for centuries in all sorts of varying climes and eras, the sort of men it built were of a similar cast: they were bold and self-reliant adventurers who, even if they had families to bring with them, were always looking to the next horizon rather than the domesticity they claimed to find appealing. As such, they saw varying work throughout their lives as explorers, Indian fighters, trappers, hunters, and sometimes even farmers, but were always on the move, having a restlessness about them that only death could stop. Such is what they imparted on the American spirit.
Hutton, in his The Undiscovered Country, attempts to show how they did so over the ages, and through that show both in what ways the frontier stayed the same and in what ways those who tamed it were different over the successive periods of exploration and conquest, with all of them being shaped by the same struggle to conquer a wild land inhabited by savage peoples.
It’s a compelling narrative and idea, but unfortunately is executed poorly overall. It’s too long, too meandering, often too detailed or repetitive, and often just not that interesting, despite being about cowboys and Indians fighting on the frontier. How Hutton managed to make such a subject drowsiness-inducing is beyond me, yet he managed it. That’s too bad, as this is a book that needs to be written, and the characters he chose to make his point are probably the right ones. But it’s just not a particularly good book, and certainly not the one it could and should have been.
11. Unqualified Reservations: Volume 2 by Curtis Yarvin
Volume II of Passage Press’s collection of Curtis Yarvin’s Unqualified Reservations writings contains three works: A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Moldbug on Carlyle, and Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.
For those who don’t know, Yarvin, a tech entrepreneur, wrote under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug” on his blog Unqualified Reservations over the course of 2007 to 2013. He wrote a slew of long-form essays that have since been turned into books and collectively undergird much of the Neoreaction (NRx) belief system. NRx is, generally, the belief that a pairing of modern technology with a functioning social order of the sort that used to exist could create a world that is far better than even the sort of world that used to exist, which was far better than that of the present.5
Yarvin’s main insight was that egalitarian mass democracy not only doesn’t work at keeping a social order functioning, in terms of creating a flourishing society, but is actively harmful to it. Further, he shows well how progressivism has essentially dismantled whatever democracy used to exist, and replaced it with a combination of rule by media, bureaucracy, and Establishment opinion, the combination of which he calls The Cathedral. He is also a strong proponent of order, and describes why it is necessary reasonably well. As order is one of the three key aspects of the rightist worldview—alongside natural hierarchy and tradition—his insights on it are interesting and helpful. However, he pairs those good insights with calls for rightists to essentially be expats in their own country while waiting for progressivism to exhaust itself in its fight against nature.
Altogether, I get the sense that were Yarvin an old money WASP rather than a new money, atheistic Jew, his outlook would essentially be the same as that of the Dukes of Beaufort circa 1740, which is that even then society was irredeemably democratic, and sitting back and fox hunting while waiting for it to fall apart was better and more pleasant than participating in the cesspit.6 As he is who he is, he tends toward biting critiques and bizarre recommendations that are generally a mix of radicalism and calls for inaction. It’s quite odd, at times, though still entertaining and interesting.
Still, generally, Yarvin presents a mostly compelling critique of the system arrived at by the liberal world order, in all its forms. However, this is a critique that is weakened not just by the ridiculous solutions he offers but by his tendency to ramble, his poor job of organizing his writing, and his atheism. This is true of all his works, including the best and most famous, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, which Passage included in Volume I of the collection.
Volume II is good in that it shows the full gamut of Yarvin, and is a reminder that his critiques of modernity are largely correct because they are rooted in a High Tory(ish) conception of order and history, though an atheistic one that muddies it considerably, but his solutions are utter nonsense that only a Silicon Valley technocrat could believe. To read Gentle Introduction is to see it put into words why all of America feels like a strip mall run by the DMV. To read his work on Carlyle is to be introduced to a worthy but largely forgotten author of the past who is well worth reading (you should read Carlyle, particularly his History of Frederick the Great), but then be confused by Yarvin’s meandering method of writing. To read his Patchwork is to wonder how anyone could possibly think such a system could work, even if the world were being reborn anew. So, much like Yarvin, it’s a delightful mix of the insightful, bizarre, and frustrating.
Despite my criticism, I really quite enjoy Yarvin’s work, including all of the Volume II collection. I think Yarvin’s critiques of democracy are generally well put, his comments about the Puritans are insightful and quite different than what they are parodied as being, and even his bad takes are at least original rather than just gibberish spewed by an ignoramus. Unlike much of what is pushed by the online right, it is interesting, largely original, and full of musings that are unsatisfying on their own but prompt me to think, which is quite helpful and which I quite like. He’s also entertaining, which makes it easier to get through than most political philosophy.
12. The Two Swords of Christ: Five Centuries of War between Islam and the Warrior Monks of Christendom by Raymond Ibrahim
Much of Ibrahim’s work is quite good. Particularly, his Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar do a superb job of using heroic examples from the history of Christendom to show the fact that Christianity has always been and will always be at war with Islam. This makes for compelling reading and is an effective rebuttal to the ridiculous claims of the “right-wing” Third Worldists that Islam can in any way be allied with against our various enemies; to be anything other than hostile to Islam is to be traitors to both our ancestors and descendants, and Ibrahim shows why.
In any case, The Two Swords of Christ is his latest book, and it covers the histories of the two great Frankish Crusading orders: The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller.
Of the three books, it’s probably his worst work, as the first half of it, roughly from the foundation of the Templars to the fall of Acre, is poorly done. Namely, he relies far too heavily on lengthy block quotes from various medieval manuscripts, and that makes it nearly unreadable at times. The formatting shifts are distracting, the pairing of modern with archaic forms of writing is disorienting, and the passages are generally just too many and too long. This is a great shame, as the subject is interesting and Ibrahim is a fabulous writer, when he actually does the writing. But, in what seemed like it stemmed from an urge to prove the claims of modern historians wrong by bringing primary sources to the fight, he ends up ruining his narrative and making the bits of the book that should be fascinating tales of dedicated crusading in the Holy Land instead a collection of random passages from medieval authors, with bits of commentary strewn about.
Fortunately, that problem ends at about the halfway point, shortly before the destruction of the Templars. For whatever reason, Ibrahim largely stops using block quotes around that point in the narrative. Instead, he uses his own brilliant language to describe how the Knights Hospitaller turned themselves into a crusading order of pirate knights who took Rhodes and took the fight to the Turks with galleys before later doing the same from Malta, and ultimately saving Christendom with their heroic defense of that island. It is a wonderful tale that ought be repeated more often, given what it shows about continuing to fight in the teeth of adversity, and Ibrahim tells it very well.
Had Ibrahim simply paraphrased more, the first half of the book would have been just as good as the second, and it would be one I would certainly recommend. As it is, it’s merely a “meh” book, as the entire first half is such a slog to read. But, still, the second half is really fantastic, and I was spellbound by it. So, if you’re interested in the subject or want to financially support a staunch defender of Christendom by getting his book, it’s still worth reading. It’s just not as good as it could have been, unfortunately.
13. Mellon: An American Life by David Cannadine
David Cannadine is best known as a historiographer of the British landed elite, particularly its destruction over the course of the 20th century, which he covers in his incredible The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. He wrote numerous books on the subject, and is remarkable in how he approached it as a somewhat critical historian of the class who still captured the melancholy and tragedy of their decline.
He also, bizarrely, wrote a biography of American banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest but least known Gilded Age titans of wealth, whose reclusive and genius grandson Tim Mellon is much of the reason Trump got elected.7 I saw the biography by chance in a used bookshop and grabbed it, as the Mellons fascinate me and Cannadine’s writing is superb.
This was probably the best book I read in January. It is incisive, utterly fascinating, includes a near-perfect amount of business detail, includes personal details without becoming a tabloid like The Chief, and somehow makes the reclusive life of an acquisitive Scots-Irish banker a terrific read.
Particularly, Cannadine does a very good job of showing the mindset of the Mellon family regarding wealth, investing, and fortune-building, and how that shaped both who Andrew became and what sort of political views regarding taxes and the Treasury he held, which was to become important when he became Treasury Secretary in the early 20th century. Namely, it led to his famous (and probably correct) quote regarding the Depression: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” Instead, the panicked response to the stock market decline meant America got taxes and regulations, and was never the same. Cannadine does a good job putting the Depression in the context of past depressions America and the Mellons had weathered largely without issue or social upheaval.
So, this book is useful on multiple levels.
For one, it’s interesting, and is probably good for younger people who want to build wealth to internalize: the Mellons arrived in America almost broke, and three generations later were some of the wealthiest and most influential people in America, all by wise investing with a focus on capital preservation, prudent risk-taking, and steady growth in the capital value of assets, along with Andrew’s penchant for finding ways to responsibly invest in the technologies of the future, such as Alcoa Aluminum. Such a mindset would probably be helpful in these days of get-rich-quick schemes and financial nihilism, as it is a reminder of how talented and disciplined men built great lives and fortunes out of much more difficult circumstances.
Similarly, it’s useful from the angle I talk about with guys like Johann Kurtz, with his book Leaving a Legacy: the Mellons still exist, and are still wealthy and influential—so influential that Thomas Mellon could be the man who helps get Trump elected twice, fund the border wall, and pay the troops during the shutdown—because they thought of money not of something to be spent but of a tool for independence and family security.
To add to all of that, there are parts of it that are spellbinding and others that are hilarious. In such a moment, Cannadine describes Mellon deciding to send the autobiography of his father, Thomas Mellon, to his future father-in-law, a well-to-do Brit, as a way of showing what the Mellons were about. As the autobiography was mainly a diatribe about the Irish and discussion of the importance of finding a wealthy bride, the father in law to be evidently found it and the Mellons a “bit strange”. Cannadine’s telling of the whole thing makes it uproariously entertaining.
All in all, it is a fascinating book that I really enjoyed reading, and I think you will as well. Enjoy!
Thanks again for reading! If you have any books in mind you’d like me to add to my list to check out, please let me know in a comment!
As Zoomer noted in the podcast and his book review article, Wood has a number of books, not just So Far and No Further!, which is the only one I can make myself get through for now. They are packed with an admirable level of detail, but are published in a tiny, double-column font and are boring beyond belief. These are reference books for the committed historian, not fun narratives to read.
Nice, appreciated this and added a few to the list
Great list, definitely added a few to the cart