History in Books
The world's story,
told by its literature
Every civilisation, every era, every corner of the map has produced literature — novels, epics, poetry, drama — that lets us feel, not merely understand, what it meant to be alive within it. These are readings across that whole range: 409 books and counting, organised into collections, published on Substack.
The Collections
Five bodies of reading
Each collection is a sustained inquiry — a list of books that, read together, illuminate something larger than any single work.
Civilisations
A 149-book chronological journey through world literature — one work per civilisation per moment, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present.
One Book Per Country
One defining book per country, mapping world literature through national borders.
Banned, Burned, and Dangerous Books
Books that were banned, burned, or branded dangerous — and the regimes they outlasted.
Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Books by women who wrote against the cultural expectations of their time, smuggling thought and imagination through walls built to keep them out.
Empire and Its Shadows
Books that grapple with empire — its rise, its violence, its long shadow on the cultures it tried to claim.
Read-alongs
Companion publications
Two publications that take a single masterwork slowly, chapter by chapter — for readers who want to dwell rather than survey.
100 cantos · c. 1308–1320
Reading Divine Comedy
One canto a day through the full Commedia — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. A guided passage through medieval cosmology, political fury, and the architecture of the soul.
74 chapters · c. 8th century BC – 19 BC
Reading Troy
The full Trojan cycle in sequence: Iliad, Posthomerica, Aeneid, Odyssey. War, homecoming, and the stubborn human need to make myths of ruin.
History in Books began as a conviction that the best way to understand history is to read what people actually wrote — not later commentary on it, but the poems, plays, and novels that shaped how civilisations saw themselves. Every review here tries to ask: what does this work let you feel that a history textbook cannot?
Published on Substack. Australian English throughout.