Category Archives: Literature

My Year in Review 2025: Movies, Books, Music & Live Performances

MOVIES

It was a slow year for moviegoing.  I watched fewer movies than usual, either in the theaters or streaming.  I’m not sure why, but family health issues and national politics may each have played a part. Early in the year we caught up on some of the acclaimed movies from 2024, and about halfway through the year, we were inspired by the New York Times’ ‘best movies of the 21st century so far’ list to see some of the films on that list. (I also added the NYT list to my own meta-list of 21st Century films.) One of my New Year’s resolutions is to watch more movies in 2026.  Here are the films I watched in 2025, with my 1-10 rating:

10/10
The Zone of Interest
 (UK/Poland, 2023) Dir: Jonathan Glazer

9/10
Margaret (US, 2011) Dir: Kenneth Lonergan
Toni Erdmann
 (Germany/Austria, 2016) Dir: Maren Ade
The Worst Person in the World (Norway, 2021) Dir: Joachim Trier
I Saw the TV Glow (US, 2024) Dir: Jane Schoenbrun
Anora
 (US, 2024) Dir: Sean Baker
One Battle After Another (US, 2025) Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

8/10
 Jazz on a Summer’s Day (US, 1959) Dir: Bert Stern
I Am Not Your Negro (US, 2016) Dir: Raoul Peck
His Three Daughters (US, 2023) Dir: Azazel Jacobs
The Outrun
 (Germany/UK, 2024) Dir: Nora Fingscheidt
A Complete Unknown (US, 2024) Dir: James Mangold
The Left-Handed Girl (Taiwan/US, 2025) Dir: Shih-Ching Tsou

7/10
The Snapper
 (Ireland, 1993) Dir: Stephen Frears
Hamilton (US, 2020) Dir: Thomas Kail
Hit Man
 (US, 2023) Dir: Richard Linklater
Challengers (US, 2024) Dir: Luca Guadagnino
Heretic
 (US, 2024) Dir: Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
The Substance
 (France/UK/US, 2024) Dir: Coralie Fargeat
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (UK, 2024) Dir: Nick Park

6/10
Ocean’s Eleven
 (US, 2001) Dir: Steven Soderbergh
Idiocracy (US, 2006) Dir: Mike Judge
Sicario
 (US, 2015) Dir: Denis Villeneuve

5/10
Hundreds of Beavers
 (US, 2022) Dir: Mike Cheslik
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
 (US, 2025) Dir: Christopher McQuarrie


BOOKS

In 2025, I continued to work my way through a large chronological ‘best literature’ reading list that is based on my meta-list of the greatest works of literature.  This year, I read a number of works published in the 1910s and 1920s.  I decided to take on Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, which occupied most of my reading time this year (I hope to finish it in 2026).  I also read Miracles and Wonder, the newest book by Elaine Pagels about the history of Christianity (you can read my review here) as well as two of her earlier books. A trip to England inspired me to read two books on British history.  Here is a list of the books I read in 2025, with my 1-5 star rating.

5/5
In Search of Lost Time I: Swann’s Way (1913). By Marcel Proust. Translated by Lydia Davis.
The Rainbow (1915). By D.H. Lawrence.
The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (1918). By Henry Adams.
In Search of Lost Time II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919). By Marcel Proust. Translated by James Grieve.
In Search of Lost Time III: The Guermantes Way (1920). By Marcel Proust. Translated by Mark Treharne.

4/5
Kokoro (1914). By Natsume Sōseki. Translated by Meredith McKinney.
The Home and the World (1916). By Rabindranath Tagore. Translated by Surendranath Tagore.
Selected Stories (1918-1926). By Lu Xun. Translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang.
Main Street (1920). By Sinclair Lewis.
The Forsyte Saga (1921). By John Galsworthy.
Zeno’s Conscience (1923). By Italo Svevo. Translated by William Weaver.
Three Plays (1923-1926). By Sean O’Casey.
An American Tragedy (1925). By Theodore Dreiser.
Three Tragedies (1932-1936). By Federico García Lorca. Translated by James Graham-Lujan and Richard L. O’Connell.
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (1988). By Elaine Pagels.
The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics (1995). By Elaine Pagels.
A History of Britain I: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-AD 1603 (2000). By Simon Schama.
These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). By Jill Lepore.
Life Between the Tides (2021). By Adam Nicolson.
Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures (2024). By Katherine Rundell.
Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025). By Elaine Pagels.

3/5
A Short History of England: The Glorious Story of a Rowdy Nation (2011). By Simon Jenkins.
Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change (2025). By Olga Khazan.


MUSIC

My music listening in 2025 was dominated by my discovery of the rock band The Warning, a trio of sisters from Mexico who play hard rock with tinges of metal, pop, and punk. Many of their fans refer to them as ‘the future of rock’ and I don’t disagree. I also spent a lot of time listening to new albums from my best of 2024 meta-list. I also binged several favorite artists of years past: The Roches, The Who, and Steely Dan. Classical music listening was down this year. Here are the top 50 albums I listened to in 2025: 

  1. The Warning – Keep Me Fed (2024)
  2. Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood (2024)
  3. The Warning – ERROR (2022)
  4. Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us (2024)
  5. The Roches – Speak (1989)
  6. Clairo – Charm (2024)
  7. Charles Lloyd – The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024)
  8. The Roches -The Roches (1979)
  9. The Who – Live at Leeds (1970)
  10. The Roches – A Dove (1992)
  11. Yasmin Williams – Acadia (2024)
  12. Mabe Fratti – Sentir Que No Sabes (2024)
  13. The Who – Quadrophenia (1973)
  14. Steely Dan – A Decade of Steely Dan (1972-1980)
  15. The Last Dinner Party – Prelude to Ecstasy (2024)
  16. Hurray For The Riff Raff – The Past Is Still Alive (2024)
  17. The Roches – Keep On Doing (1982)
  18. Adam Steinberg – Angels + Angles (2022)
  19. The Roches – Another World (1985)
  20. Steely Dan – Can’t Buy A Thrill (1972)
  21. Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert (rec. 1966)
  22. Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic (1974)
  23. The Roches – Can We Go Home Now (1995)
  24. Alvvays – Blue Rev (2022)
  25. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Wild God (2024)
  26. World Party – Arkeology (rec. 1984-2011)
  27. Michael Kiwanuka – Small Changes (2024)
  28. Charlie Parker – The Complete Savoy & Dial Master Takes (rec. 1944-1948)
  29. Steely Dan – Katy Lied (1975)
  30. Brittany Howard – What Now (2024)
  31. SZA – SOS (2022)
  32. Steely Dan – Countdown To Ecstasy (1973)
  33. Nala Sinephro – Endlessness (2024)
  34. The Who – Tommy (1969)
  35. The Who – Who’s Next (1971)
  36. Waxahatchee – Out in the Storm (2017)
  37. Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch (2024)
  38. Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud (2020)
  39. Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid (2010)
  40. Lucinda Williams – West (2007)
  41. The New Pornographers – Electric Version (2003)
  42. The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema (2005)
  43. Andrew Sue Wing – Seventeen (2024)
  44. Björk – Vespertine (2001)
  45. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks (1975)
  46. Fontaines D.C. – Romance (2024)
  47. Jamey Johnson – The Guitar Song (2010)
  48. Kim Deal – Nobody Loves You More (2024)
  49. Lana Del Rey – Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd (2023)
  50. Oscar Peterson – Night Train (1962)

LIVE PERFORMANCES

For the first time in several years, I didn’t attend concerts by any of my favorite indie or alternative pop & rock artists.  Instead, most of the concerts I attended in 2025 were for classical music, with two jazz concerts, and one singer-songwriter concert at a new (to me) venue: the Rec Room in Belmont.  I didn’t see any plays this year, but did enjoy a night of improv comedy for the first time in many years.  Here are the live performances I attended in 2025, in chronological order:

  • The Makanda Project with Charles Tolliver at Boston Public Library, Roxbury, MA 3/5/25
  • Jeremy Denk at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA 3/21/25
    Performing Partitas (BWV 825-830) by J.S. Bach
  • Cambridge Jazz Festival at Danehy Park, Cambridge, MA 7/26/25
    Ron Reid’s Precious Metals Project
    Namisa Mdalose & Lumanyano Bizana
  • Improv Asylum at Charles Playhouse, Boston, MA 8/16/25
    The Main Stage Show (Barker, Carty, Gillis, Sosebee, etc.)
  • Andrew Sue Wing at The Rec Room, Belmont, MA 9/9/25
  • A Tribute to Scott Nickrenz at Calderwood Hall, Gardner Museum. Boston, MA 9/10/25
    Performers included: Yo-Yo MaJason BellPaavali Jumppanen, Lawrence DuttonBorromeo QuartetA Far Cry
  • Convivium Musicum at First Unitarian Church, Worcester, MA 11/23/25
    Performing works of Gregorio Allegri, Noel Bauldeweyn, Adrian Willaert, Jacob Handl, and Josquin des Prez
  • Paula Robison & Paavali Jumppanen at Williams Hall, NEC, Boston, MA 12/14/25
    Performing works of J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, and Mozart

The Best of 2025: Movies, TV, Music & Books

It’s that time of year again, when various publications and individuals publish their “best of the year” lists. It seems like these lists come out earlier every year.  (I only hope that the listmakers go back to the prior December to find any gems they’ve missed in their eagerness to get their list out in late November or early December.)

I’ve compiled dozens of lists, as I do each year, to see which items reached a critical consensus as the best in their particular art form.  These are not my personal opinions.  I have not seen all these movies or TV shows, read all these books, or listened to all this music.  The links to the lists are below:

Best Films of 2025
Best TV Shows of 2025
Best Music of 2025
Best Books of 2025

To give you a sneak peek, here are the top items on each of the four lists:

BOOKS (3-way tie)
A Guardian and a Thief. By Megha Majumdar.
Audition. By Katie Kitamura.
Mother Mary Comes To Me. By Arundhati Roy.

MUSIC 
GeeseGetting Killed

TV SHOWS
Andor 

FILM
One Battle After Another

Please feel free to leave your comments about favorite movies, books, TV, and music of 2025 in the comments!

Meta-List Updates

I’ve updated a number of the website pages on Make Lists, Not War.

(1) Timeline of Human History, Part V: 2000-Present
I’ve been a little behind in doing the year-by-year summaries, but I am now up to date.  I’ve added important world events for the years 2021-2024.  The big additions include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, various items regarding Donald Trump, and news about climate change.  I’m still delinquent about adding photos to the years since 2016. I’ll get to that eventually.
Here’s the link:
Timeline of Human History Part V: 2000-Present

(2) Best of the 21st Century (so far): Film, Music, and Books
As we approach the end of the 1st quarter of the 21st Century, a number of new lists have been published, and I’ve added these to the meta-list.  The new lists didn’t change the top items in music or film (The White StripesElephant, and There Will Be Blood), but the top of the book list is now a three-way tie: The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, Atonement, by Ian McEwan, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.  As I mention elsewhere, one of the odd results of collecting “best of the 21st century” lists over time is that the meta-list tends to be biased toward the first part of the century.  The lists contain almost no items from 2020 or later.  I’m sure that will be remedied as new lists are produced and added to the meta list.
Here’s the link
Best of the 21st Century (so far)

(3) Best Athletes of All Time
It has been several years since I updated the Best Athletes lists. I found six new lists and added them to the meta-lists.  New additions include Simone Biles and Novak Djokovic.  Athletes who were already on the lists but moved up considerably included Serena Williams, Tom Brady, and LeBron James.  To the dismay of all, Lance Armstrong remains on the list, due to a glitch in the meta-list process. Even though none of the lists that were made after 2013 include Armstrong, I found 8 lists made before the revelations about his performance-enhancing drug use that did include him. I have left this artifact of time on the list with an asterisk to explain the oddity.  Not yet on enough lists to make the meta-list are swimmer Katie Ledecky and basketball phenom Caitlin Clark, although my guess is that they will reach the meta-list in the future.
Here are the lists:
Best Athletes of All Time – Ranked (with photos)
Best Athletes of All Time – By Sport (without photos)

My Year in Books – 2024

As usual, the bulk of my reading this year followed my world literature meta-list.  I began this particular project with The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BCE) in 2012 and have progressed chronologically ever since.  This year I turned the corner into the 20th Century, an exciting milestone.  Highlights included a wonderful multi-generational novel from Portugal that deserves to be better known (The Maias, written by Eça de Queirós in 1888), a somber modernist tale from Norway (Hunger, by Knut Hamsun) and the thought-provoking, darkly ironic plays of George Bernard Shaw.  A large chunk of my reading time this year was devoted to the works of Sigmund Freud. I read a compendium of six of his works (Interpretation of Dreams, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Wit and the Unconscious, Totem and Taboo, and History of the Psychoanalytic Movement).  (The book was left over from a college philosophy class in the early 1980s; I didn’t get around to reading it back then!) To obtain some perspective on how Freud’s theories are perceived now, I read the recent biography by Frank Tallis, Mortal Secrets.  My views on Freud are complicated, but right now I believe he was a revolutionary thinker and psychologist whose ideas influenced the development of psychology and psychotherapy, mostly for the good, although also in negative ways.  He was no scientist, but recent science has found support for some of his theories.

My continuing studies of art led me to read a number of art books, including a riveting biography of one of my art heroes, Marcel Duchamp, by Calvin Tomkins.  I also read a very funny memoir by one of my favorite comedians, Maria Bamford (Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult).  I was fascinated by my friend Andy LeCompte’s account of his experiences in an actual cult (Finding Miracles.)

Here are the books I read this year, with Goodreads rating.

5 Stars

  1. The Maias – Eça de Queirós (Portugal, 1888)
  2. Hunger – Knut Hamsun (Norway, 1890)
  3. Plays – George Bernard Shaw (UK, 1893-1912)
  4. Duchamp: A Biography – Calvin Tomkins (US, 1996)
  5. Finding Miracles: Escape from a Cult – Andrew LeCompte (US, 2024)

4 Stars

  1. The Essential Tales of Chekhov – Anton Chekhov (Russia, 1880-1903)
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche (Germany, 1885)
  3. Plays – Anton Chekhov (Russia, 1887-1904)
  4. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Short Stories – Oscar Wilde (Ireland/UK, 1888-1891)
  5. Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith (UK, 1892)
  6. A Shropshire Lad – A.E. Housman (UK, 1896)
  7. Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand (France, 1897)
  8. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud – Sigmund Freud (A.A. Brill, ed.) (Austria, 1899-1914)
  9. The Immoralist – André Gide (France, 1902)
  10. The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James (US, 1902)
  11. The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois (US, 1903)
  12. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Max Weber (Germany, 1905)
  13. The Confusions of Young Törless – Robert Musil (Austria, 1906)
  14. The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays – John Millington Synge (Ireland, 1902-1907)
  15. Mythologies – Roland Barthes (France, 1957)
  16. Greek Art – John Boardman (UK, 1964)
  17. History of Modern Art – H. Harvard Arnason (US, 1968)
  18. After Modern Art: 1945-2000 – David Hopkins (UK, 2000)
  19. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity – Peter Attia (US, 2023)
  20. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere – Maria Bamford (US, 2023)
  21. Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind – Frank Tallis (UK, 2024)

3 Stars

  1. Art: A Brief History – Marilyn Stokstad (US, 1999)

 

 

 

 

The Best of 2024: Film, TV, Music, Books

I’ve created meta-lists of the best of 2024 by collecting end-of-year lists from the critics.  Here are the meta-lists, organized with the items on the most lists at the top.

Every year since the 1990s, I’ve been creating these meta-lists to help me decide what to watch, listen to, and read.  I hope they can provide you with some guidance in making intelligent choices for the use of your precious time!

Best Films of 2024
Best TV Shows of 2024
Best Music of 2024 (Albums)
Best Books of 2024

The Best of 2023: Movies, TV, Music & Books

Once again, I have compiled meta-lists of the best of the year in film, television, music, and literature.  I began undertaking this project over 20 years ago when I decided that, with limited time to read books, watch movies and TV shows, and listen to music, I wanted to reduce my chances of encountering dreck and increase the percentage of that I would encounter gems.  The solution I chose to this problem was to collect the opinions of multiple critics when they issue their end-of-year “best of” lists.  While the method is not foolproof (I do occasionally find critical faves that I don’t like, and I also sometimes run across items I rate highly that the critics didn’t like so much), it has been a success overall.  One of the best aspects of this method is that it gets me outside my comfort zone.  By collecting and collating these lists, creating the meta-lists that are linked below, I have expanded my horizons and encountered works of art that I might not have found if I had stayed within the recommendations of friends and family, or of just one favored critic.  Why go by the recommendations of one random person when you have at your fingertips the critical consensus of over a dozen experts?

Here are the links to this year’s lists:

Best Films of 2023
Best TV Shows of 2023
Best Music of 2023
Best Books of 2023

Getting Up To Speed: A Meta-List Update Report

I’ve updated a number of the meta-lists, using original source lists I obtained from various sources, including books, magazines, and websites.  I’ve updated several of the film lists and the literature (book) lists.  I added three new film lists, including a best 100 films from Stephanie Zacharek at Time magazine, and about 10 new best literature lists.  The literature lists hadn’t been updated in almost 10 years.  Here are the links to the updated lists:

MOVIES
Best Films of All Time – Ranked
Best Films of All Time – Chronological
Best Films of All Time – By Director
Best of the 21st Century (So Far)  (Note: Only the movies section of this list has been updated.)

LITERATURE
Greatest Works of Literature – Ranked
Greatest Works of Literature – Chronological
Greatest Works of Literature – By Author
The Big Literature List: A Meta-Meta List

Some may be wondering, why make lists of the greatest literature and not the greatest books?  I have actually given this quite a bit of thought.  I do have some lists that reference books, but the category of literature gives me an opportunity to include bodies of work, not just specific books. In many cases (esp. for writers known best for their poems, essays or short stories), people making “best of” lists will simply list the author’s entire body of work, without singling out any particular poem, story or essay.  There are often multiple collections of the author’s work in the genre, but instead of randomly selecting one of these collections as a “best book”, I thought it made more sense to reference the works as bodies of work (thus the italicized items in the literature lists).  (Although when listers do reference a specific collection/compilation, I have included it.)  Because these bodies of work aren’t books as such, I’ve used the more encompassing term “literature” for these lists (even though I’m aware that the algorithms and search terms might be looking for “best books”).

My Year in Books – 2022

In 2022, I continued to go through my Greatest Works of Literature list, a project I began back in 2011.  I’m now up to the mid-19th Century.  A big part of the year was spent reading four of the six books in the Barsetshire Chronicles, by Anthony Trollope. I had never read anything of his before, and he is now one of my favorite 19th Century authors. I occasionally detoured to the 21st Century to read books on nature and art, and one recent novel.  I was excited to read the book Loving Orphaned Space by my college friend Mrill Ingram (see my review HERE).

Here are the 21 books I finished in 2022, in order of publication date, with my 1-5 star rating.  Thanks to Goodreads for providing a space to keep track of my reading.

  1. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni (1827) (4/5)
  2. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Victor Hugo (1831) (4/5)
  3. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse – Alexander Pushkin (1833) (4/5)
  4. Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac (1835) (5/5)
  5. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal (1839) (4/5)
  6. Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville (1835, 1840) (5/5)
  7. Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol (1842) (4/5)
  8. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket – Edgar Allan Poe (1844) (4/5)
  9. Walden – Henry David Thoreau (1849) (5/5)
  10. The Prelude – William Wordsworth (1850) (5/5)
  11. The Warden – Anthony Trollope (1855) (4/5)
  12. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (1856) (4/5)
  13. Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope (1857) (4/5)
  14. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin (1859) (5/5)
  15. The Small House at Allington – Anthony Trollope (1864) (4/5)
  16. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope (1867) (5/5)
  17. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting – Syd Field (1979) (4/5)
  18. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World – Jon Young (2012) (4/5)
  19. The Hidden Life of Trees – Peter Wohlleben (2015) (4/5)
  20. Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell (2020) (3/5)
  21. Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth – Mrill Ingram (2022) (5/5)

The Best of 2022: The End-of-Year Lists

I have compiled meta-lists of the best movies, TV shows, music, and books of 2022 by combining multiple end-of-year lists published in magazines, newspapers, and websites.  These lists provide a critical consensus of the year’s best.

Here are links to the lists:

Best Films of 2022
Best TV Shows of 2022
Best Music of 2022
Best Books of 2022

As a sneak preview, here are the most-listed items in each category:

Film: Aftersun
TV: Better Call Saul
Music: (tie): BeyoncéRenaissance and RosalíaMotomami 
Book: The Candy House. By Jennifer Egan

My Year in Books: 2021

In 2021, I continued to work my way through the chronological “greatest books of all time” list, focusing primarily on books I already own (with occasional trips to the library).  I finished the 18th Century and moved into the 19th Century.  One of the highlights was the four volume Dream of the Red Chamber (also know as Story of the Stone), one of the four classic Chinese novels.  (I had previously read The Water Margin and Journey to the West/Monkey, two of the other classics.)  But I veered off the greatest booklist path a few times.  I read two books on recent biological discoveries – I like to keep up-to-date with science. I read some art books, as part of my recent obsession with art. And I read some history/biography.  My niece gave me a 2018 Frederick Douglass bio as a gift, so I read that and then of course I needed to read Douglass’s autobiography. And a friend raved about the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s American Revolution trilogy, so I checked that out as well.  Another friend loaned me The Pueblo Revolt, which helped provide historical context for our vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico in September/October.

Here are the books I finished in 2021 (in chronological order by publication date), with my 1-5 star rating:

  1. The Social Contract (1762). By Jean-Jacques Rousseau (4/5)
  2. The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). By Oliver Goldsmith (4/5)
  3. The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings (1774). By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (4/5)
  4. Dangerous Liaisons (1782) By Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (4/5)
  5. Confessions (1782). By Jean-Jacques Rousseau (4/5)
  6. Dream of the Red Chamber (Story of the Stone) (1791). By Cao Xeuqin (and Gao E) (5/5)
  7. Autobiography and Selected Writings (1791). By Benjamin Franklin (4/5)
  8. Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). By William Blake (4/5)
  9. Kant: Selections (1770-1797). By Immanuel Kant. Edited by Theodore M. Greene (4/5)
  10. Faust: A Tragedy, Part One (1808). By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (4/5)
  11. Persuasion (1817). By Jane Austen (4/5)
  12. Faust, Part Two (1832). By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (4/5)
  13. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). By Frederick Douglass (4/5)
  14. Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (1976). By Frederick Hartt (5/5)
  15. The Pueblo Revolt (1994). By Robert Silverberg (5/5)
  16. Modern Art in the U.S.A.: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (2000). By Patricia Hills (4/5)
  17. Why Evolution Is True (2008). By Jerry A. Coyne (4/5)
  18. Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation (2010). By William Furlong (4/5)
  19. A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth (2015). By Peter D. Ward (3/5)
  20. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018). By David W. Blight (5/5)
  21. The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (2019). By Rick Atkinson (4/5)