What I Have Been Reading (2025)

In 2025 my book on Bujangga Manik was published at long last. In February I finished a writing project I’d been working on for the preceding couple of years. I’m not sure what will come of that, but there’s no rush there. It has been a strange year. I visited the largest stone circle in the Iberian Peninsula, stood at/under the hypocentres of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and walked across a nightingale floor. I travelled to the UK a couple of times. In September I gave a best man’s speech at a wedding in Hampshire. I gave up drinking alcohol before Christmas 2024 — I have a little drink now and then for special occasions but I’m otherwise sober — and have maintained a fairly strict exercise regimen, including regular qigong practice and weight training at least twice a week. At 38, I feel calmer and stronger than I ever have, in spite of all the world’s horrors.

I read a lot this year as well.

I started 2025 reading an abridged English-language version of Alexander von Humboldt’s Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (or Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829), as the title of the version I read has it). In the Voyage Humboldt recounts his travels through the Spanish Empire in the Americas between 1799 and 1804. I read the account primarily for pleasure but also to assist in a project I was working on, and it was great; Humboldt was quite a guy. In January and early February, I also read:

• Darwin’s *Voyage of the Beagle*;
• The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates;
• A Journey to the Northern Ocean by Samuel Hearne; and
• Plato’s Timaeus and Critias (Loeb Classical Library editions; I read these in English as I don’t know Greek).

My wife and I went to Japan in the middle of February. I took my Kindle along with me and, with it, a small collection of old Japanese texts in English translation, all of them (I think?) Penguin Classics. This included a collection of scripts for nō plays.

I hadn’t expected nō theatre to be so genuinely affecting. I read the scripts for Ama (海人) and *Atsumori (敦盛) on the plane from Tokyo to Nagasaki and — it may have been the altitude, or the jet lag from our exhausting initial flight out from Lisbon — at the end of the latter a lump appeared in my throat. Something about the earnest message of compassion in the plays moved me. I bought a collection of [nō scripts](https://www.shinchosha.co.jp/book/355911/) in Japanese at a great bookshop in Kyoto, and when we were in Nara we watched about 2/3 of a performance of Sumidagawa (隅田川) on the television. We were able to get the gist from an online summary of the play and from the subtitles, which were heavy on Chinese characters. (I later discovered that Benjamin Britten had written his own version of Sumidagawa set in medieval England, entitled [Curlew River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curlew_River), which I will have to have a listen to at some point.*)

We also visited the oldest extant nō stage, which is at Miyajima/Itsukushima, off the coast of Hiroshima, although we didn’t know it was the oldest at the time; I only found out when I saw a photograph of it on Wikipedia. Anyway, here it is:

My wife’s photo of the nō stage at Miyajima — February 2025.

After coming back to Portugal, I read Chōmei’s *Hōjōki*, an excellent piece of ascetic literature, again in English translation (by Meredith McKinney). The ambivalent attitude Chōmei exhibits towards his lifestyle felt very real and very human. I know I’ll return to the text in future.

In a similar vein I read:

• Essays in Idleness/Tsurezuregusa (1330–1332) by Yoshida Kenkō (who seemed to me a naturally conservative and rather fussy man);
• *Tales of Ise*, translated by Peter Macmillan;
• a collection of Matsuo Bashō’s haiku, translated by Lucien Stryk;
• *Buddhist Scriptures*, edited by Donald S. Lopez (600+ pages of assorted Buddhist texts from various periods and traditions);
• *Dhammapada*, translated by Valerie Roebuck (I’d already read the OWC translation ten or fifteen years ago or so but it was good to refresh);
• some translations of Buddhist sutras by Red Pine;
• D. T. Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism, double-gaze Orientalism distilled;
• and Tenzin Chögyel’s *Life of the Buddha*, an 18th-century Tibetan prose Buddhacarita.

I picked up some Chinese stuff in Japan too — mostly calligraphy manuals but also some editions of Chinese poetry. I happened across an old two-volume edition of the *Classic of Poetry/Book of Songs on the street in Ueno one evening and paid about £3 for it. It’s amazing what one can find in Japan. Relatedly, I re-read John Minford’s abridged translation of [Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/299446/strange-tales-from-a-chinese-studio-by-pu-songling-translated-with-a-introduction-by-john-minford/)*, a collection of bizarre stories (about ghosts, fox spirits, concubines, dildos, beheadings, and so forth) written down in the late seventeenth century by Pu Songling (蒲松齡).

I also read:

• the Daodejing in the original, assisted by English translations by John C. H. Wu and D. C. Lau (there may be better translations out there, but I was concentrating on the original text);
• *Chinese Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader* by Graham Lock and Gary Linebarger, which I worked through all the way, doing all the exercises, and which I found very helpful.

This is the only significant reading I did in Chinese this year.

In Portuguese, I read António Galvão’s Tratado dos Descobrimentos (‘treatise on the discoveries’), a work published in Lisbon in 1563. A notebook containing the text of the treatise was found among Galvão’s possessions after his death. The publication was paid for by the executor of his estate. It isn’t a well-written book, but the subject matter is very interesting. The text was translated into English and published in 1601; the 1601 text was republished with clarifying notes by the Hakluyt Society in 1862. I have prepared my own translation but haven’t finished writing notes for it, and I’ve lost any enthusiasm for working on Portuguese things at the moment. I might do something about that after we’ve made the move to Ireland. It was an interesting project but I’m not sure it needs publishing.

Anyway, because of Galvão, I read Edward Wilson-Lee’s *A History of Water, a good recent work of popular history on intellectual life in sixteenth-century Portugal. And because Galvão cites the Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos in his description of ancient navigation, I read Nepos’ Liber de excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium* (‘book on the great leaders of foreign peoples’) in both English and Latin (again a Loeb edition/translation).

I ended up reading a lot of classical texts this year. I’d previously read a fair bit of Greek philosophy — pre-Socratics, some Aristotle, that sort of thing — in translation, and I’d read some Greek and Latin poetry here and there, but I’d never actually sat down and read Homer or Herodotus. I decided to remedy that. In English I read:

• The *Argonautica* (Jason and the Argonauts), translated by Richard Hunter;
• The *Iliad*, translated by Anthony Verity;
• The *Odyssey*, translated by Robert Fagles;
• Herodotus’ *Histories*, translated by Aubrey De Sélincourt;
• Lucretius’ *On the Nature of the Universe*, translated by Ronald Melville, chunks of which I had read some years before; and
• John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B (1958), a copy of which I bought at a charity shop in Cambridge in 2019 but hadn’t begun reading until 2025.

I found a copy of Robin Lane Fox’s *The Classical World* on a shelf at my parents’ house in September and decided to give that a read as well. It was fine — not the kind of book I would write or, ordinarily, read, but it was certainly informative (about ancient life but also about classicists’ attitudes).

The most interesting text I read this year was Virgil’s Eclogues, or Bucolics, which I read in Latin, a language I learned as an adult and know poorly. I pored over every word, repeated the text out loud (in an attempt at classical rather than ecclesiastical pronunciation), and copied out the entire thing into a notebook, with notes on vocabulary and meaning. My guide was an edition and Portuguese translation by Frederico Lourenço, which includes detailed notes and a useful introduction — much more detail than you’ll find in a Loeb. I felt a powerful sense of accomplishment after working my way through Eclogue 1, and it sustained me through some very tricky passages (‘untranslatable’, some say). The process changed my relationship with Latin — not just my understanding of it, although that was obviously enhanced, but also the way I viewed the language. I now see Virgil’s poetry as incredibly, undeniably, vitally beautiful. A literally life-changing experience.

I read a bunch of follow-up texts in English translation, at least some of which I will revisit in the original:

• The *Georgics*, in English translation (Loeb);
• The *Idylls of Theocritus, the model for the Eclogues*, translated by Anthony Verity;
• Pindar’s *Odes, also translated by Anthony Verity (I read the Loeb edition/translation of the Odes* twenty years ago or so; I will concede that it’s a bit strange that I had read Pindar and Hesiod but not Homer before this year).

I also picked up a copy of Lourenço’s edition and translation of the complete poetry of Horace in the Livraria Bertrand on Rua Garrett (‘the world’s oldest bookshop’), but I have yet to read past the introduction.

Buddhist and Greco-Roman texts made up the bulk of my reading this year, but I made my way through a few others on various topics, including:

• The *Prose Edda*, translated by Jesse Byock;
• Bede’s *Ecclesiastical History of the English People*;
• *The Rule of Benedict*, translated by Carolinne White;
• The *Complete Poems* of Sir Thomas Wyatt;
• Wendy Doniger’s much-criticised but still fairly interesting abridged translation of the *Rig Veda*, which I read in the mornings before everyone else had woken up at a music festival in England this summer;
• *Understand Music Theory*, by Margaret Richer, which I read because I had very little understanding of how music works and wanted to change that; and
• *Letterlocking* by Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith — a fascinating book about the late-medieval and early modern practice of ‘locking’ letters. I’ve practised some of the techniques in the book already and I intend to try more in the future.

I was unable to work during the huge power cut that affected Portugal and Spain on the 28th of April, and I spent the day making flashcards of vocabulary items and sentences from Michel Launey’s *Introduction to Classical Nahuatl. *I’ll probably return to the language at some point in the future.

What did I learn from all this reading? Well, a great deal, of course. Few of the books I read in 2025 pertained to topics I already had some expertise in (I have a degree in Chinese but I’m very far from an expert in it). I learned a lot of words and some new skills. I gained a new appreciation for poetry and a much greater awareness and understanding of some topics that I simply hadn’t previously possessed.

Almost all these books were written by men. I normally read more broadly in gender terms. In 2026 I’m going to have to take a break from this ‘classical’, male, often misogynistic world. (I hadn’t realised, incidentally, quite how openly misogynistic Buddhist literature often is.)

In 2026, my wife and I will be moving to Ireland. Everything’s going to change. I’m not sure what it will all look like when the dust settles after the move, and it’s difficult to make plans for reading and scholarship when you don’t know where you’ll end up living or what you’ll end up doing with your time. But I’ve enjoyed the reading I’ve done this year and hope to continue with some different authors and different topics next year, and it’s possible that this will lead to some scholarly projects of some kind.

Since I’m sort of summing up my year here, these are the best films I watched for the first time in 2025:

• *Train Dreams*
• *Nosferatu*

I believe Eggers’ Nosferatu came out late last year in the US, but I saw it in the cinema in the UK in January. It was perfect — exactly what I was hoping for. By contrast, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein disappointed me (and I didn’t like the colour palette, or many of the other choices). Train Dreams is a beautiful film. I found myself thinking about it for a few days after watching it, and I can’t remember the last time a movie made me so emotional. (It was probably 2019’s *Just Mercy*, about convicts on death row.)

I don’t play a lot of video games, but the best ones I played in 2025 were:

• *Labyrinth of the Demon King*
• *Peaks of Yore* (I’m terrible at it but I like the concept).

And that’s that for 2025. Merry Christmas!

Alex West — Lisbon, 2025