About this project
Reading the world
through its literature
A conviction turned into a publication: that the best way to understand history is to read what people actually wrote.
The idea
Every civilisation, every era, every corner of the map has produced literature — novels, epics, poetry, drama, scripture, memoir. And that literature does something no history textbook can: it lets you feel what it meant to be alive within the civilisation that produced it.
History in Books is a research project built on that conviction. The method is simple: research a book, write a reading of it, and group those readings into collections that illuminate something larger than any single work. No civilisation is treated as marginal. African oral epics carry the same weight as Greek ones; a medieval Persian court poem is as worthy of attention as a Victorian novel.
The project currently spans 409 readings across five collections, published on Substack and presented here.
The collections
Each collection is a sustained literary inquiry — a set of books selected because, read together, they reveal something that no individual title could:
- Civilisations — 154 readings
- One Book Per Country — 103 readings
- Banned, Burned, and Dangerous Books — 51 readings
- Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To — 50 readings
- Empire and Its Shadows — 51 readings
The readings
Each "reading" is a short essay — typically 1,500–3,000 words — that introduces a single book: where it came from, what it contains, and why it matters within its civilisation and to readers today. The goal is not to be comprehensive but to be honest: to say what the book actually does, and to invite the reader in.
A growing number of readings are illustrated with images generated to accompany the text, and a smaller number include narration audio.
The read-alongs
Alongside the main publication, two companion Substack publications take a single masterwork slowly — one canto or chapter at a time — for readers who want to dwell rather than survey:
- Reading Divine Comedy — 100 cantos through Dante's Commedia, from Inferno to Paradiso.
- Reading Troy — 74 chapters through the full Trojan cycle: Iliad, Posthomerica, Aeneid, Odyssey.
The publication
All readings are published on Substack at historyinbooks.substack.com . The site you are reading now presents the same content in a more structured, book-like format.
The project is written in Australian English throughout — partly out of principle, partly out of habit.