(This is a reread. I originally read this book in 7th grade. But since this is my first time reviewing this book on this blog, according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.)
* I've double checked and it turns out he added the bit about Psalms in a comment (not a video): "SO glad this is being so enthusiastically received! We'll move on to Homer next, but first I wanted to address the oversight so many of you are pointing out: yes, by all means, add the Book of Psalms to the list!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVL3rKcv0HQ&lc=UgjVUI78P9PA_3gCoAEC
(This past week I also watched Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but those reviews won't post until the next few days, so we'll have to count them in 2026's round-up.)
I've decided that for this next year, my goal is to cultivate the habit of being a reader, and any time spent watching screens (be it movies, TV or Youtube) is time that I'm losing out on reading.
...and I actually did stick to this the first half of the year. Aside from movies I had to watch because of work (i.e. movies that I had to show to a class of students when I was working as a substitute teacher), I didn't watch any movies for the first half of 2025.
But, by the second half of 2025, I started getting the urge to watch more movies again.
At the moment I'm writing this, I still have that urge. So maybe expect to see more movie reviews on this blog in 2026?
Also, as with every year, I watched a lot of Youtube videos. At one point I decided it would be worthwhile to keep track of what I was watching, and started posting all those videos to my blog...
[I also finished The Book of Psalms (from my readthrough of the Bible), and Suicide Squad Vol. 8: The Final Mission, but my reviews of those won't post until the next few days. (I've been watching a lot of movies recently, so I'm currently working my way through a bit of a backlog of video reviews.) So since those reviews will post in 2026, I'll have to count those in my 2026 reading list instead of this year.]
2025 was a unique year for me--it was the first year that I have spent entirely in the United States since I started this blog. Every previous year I had been living abroad (with the exception of 8 months back in 2006), and my reading list from each year reflected the paucity of English books available abroad.
But for 2025, I was back in the United States, and could read anything I wanted to.
Technically I arrived back in the United States at the end of 2024, but I didn't truly sort out my access to interlibrary loan until the start of 2025. And then with interlibrary loan, I finally had access to just about every book I could wish for.
It's a bit unclear to me what the future of Melcat (the interlibrary loan system in Michigan) is going to be. I actually had been expecting it to stop working at sometime this past year. But here we are at the end of 2025, and it still seems to be up and running. We'll see if it lasts another year. (Call your congressperson, if you haven't already.)
So, my reading list for 2025 was marked not only by my access to Melcat, but also by my fear that this access to Melcat would soon be ending. For example, there were several books on my rereads list this year that I had been meaning to reread eventually, but if I had thought I had more time, I might have waited until next year. But Melcat seemed to be running on borrowed time, so if I was ever going to track these books down on interlibrary loan, this seemed to be the year to do it.
Anyway, with that explanation out of the way, my reading list this year largely broke down into the following categories:
As I've mentioned before on this blog, the past couple years I've started to make more of a point of rereading, for a couple of reasons. One is the influence of booktube, and how many booktubers regularly reread books. The other is just that I'm getting to that age where a lot of time has now passed since my youth, and many of these books are faded enough in my memory that it is time to revisit them. Also, if I'm being perfectly honest, sometimes my review project is driving my reading list--that is, some of these books I reread just because I wanted an excuse to talk about them at length. Most of the books on this list are books that I've been wanting to reread for years, but couldn't find them out in Vietnam. But now that I'm back in the United States, I can easily track them down.
The idea behind thisBlogging the Canon Project was that I would start at the very beginning of the Western Canon, and just work my way forward. Of course the very beginning is ancient Mesopotamia. When I first started this project, I thought that ancient Mesopotamia would be done with fairly quickly--just The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Enuma Elish and The Code of Hammurabi, and then it would be on to the Greeks and the Romans. But the more I dig into this, the more I discover that there is just more and more out there. I'm getting deeper and deeper into Akkadian literature, and I'm nowhere at the end of it yet. And I haven't even started with the surviving Canaanite literature, Hittite literature, Egyptian literature, or Sumerian literature. (Technically if I wanted to do this all in order, I should have started with Sumerian, but I'm still learning as I go, so I didn't realize that at the start of this project.)
At my current reading rate, I don't think I will ever finish with ancient Mesopotamia and will consequently never get to ancient Greece and Rome.
So, in 2026, I'm going to try to alternate a bit. I'm still going to work on ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm also going to at least start on ancient Greece at the same time. I can do two things at once, right?
Also this year, I've been trying to read some general histories on ancient Mesopotamia in order to give some context for my reading of the ancient literature:
(And if we count podcasts, I've also spent a lot of time this past year listening to The Oldest Stories Podcast, which is all about ancient Mesopotamian history and literature. But since I'm not yet finished with my 2nd listening of that podcast, I'll have to count it in my 2026 round-up.)
Because the Blogging the Canon Project has always been admittedly quixotic (I'm never actually going to work my way through the whole Western Canon before I die), I try to make it a point each year to read a few other random classics.
I've also mentioned this before on this blog, but I got back into reading comic books a few years ago, mostly on the influence of other booktubers who were doing it. (I didn't need that much persuasion, but it gave me permission to indulge in a guilty pleasure.)
The problem is most comic books are not written for adults, so it does sometimes feel a bit silly critiquing them from an adult perspective. And also reading something below your level is something that you should only do in small quantities.
My idea goal is to always be reading a graphic novel on the side, but to not have graphic novels take over my reading list.
However, because I was always checking out a lot of graphic novels from the library, I found that I ended up prioritizing reading them just in order to finish all of them before the due date.
Vision & The Scarlet Witch: The Saga Of Wanda And Vision was the book that finally convinced me to slow down and moderate my comic books more. It was an interesting book in that it had a lot of key points in Marvel continuity, but the dialogue was so bad, and the stories always resolved in just stupid fight scenes. As I finished that book, I thought to myself, "Why am I wasting so much time reading this trash?" After that, I resolved to only order 1 comic book at a time through inter-library loan.
My big comic book projects for this year were reading through the complete Bone series, Dick Tracy and the Teen Titans. These are all properties I'm fond of, but working through the whole series does have high points and low points, and there were times when I felt each of these series to be a bit of a slog. (Being a completionist does sometimes have its disadvantages.) And, once again, my reading list was motivated by wanting to complete as much of these series as I could before Melcat disappeared. If I hadn't been worried about Melcat disappearing, I might have added more variety into my comic book reading and explored other titles.
Alright, so, with all that out of the way, these are my recommendations for this year:
Many of the history and historical fiction books I read this year are recommendations. With the usual caveat being, assuming you're interested in history, of course.
I was happy that Man's Fate was just as good as I remembered it, as long as you forgive the fact that Andre Malraux isn't writing an authentic story about China, but engaging in orientalism. But it's still a really good story.
Pontius Pilate by Paul L. Maier is a book written for Christians, but as I argued in my review, it has enough historical detail in it that it can still be enjoyed by skeptics.
Also, most of the classics I read this year are classics for a reason.
J.M. Barrie doesn't get enough credit for his humor in Peter Pan.
Of Mice and Men is read by just about every high school student in America, but it's stayed popular for a reason.
Metamorphoses by Ovid can get a bit repetitive after a while, but it's also a very impressive collection of ancient stories collected by a skilled storyteller.
