Breaking from tradition, I've decided to list three non-history books this year, and really, three classics that I either re-read for the first time as an adult, or read for the first time, having somehow missed them in high school or college English classes.
The first book on the list is Grapes of Wrath, which I have to admit I had never read before. I loved this book much more than Steinbeck's shorter novels that I've read. I thought the contrapuntal pace (where he intersperses one chapter about the Joads with another chapter, generically, about the Okie experience) was very smart and helped the pacing. I loved the characters of Ma Joad and Tom Joad specifically, and the ending with Rose-of-Sharon really came out of left field and threw me for a loop. Not to mention, this book resonated with some of the classes I teach as a historian. I've taught the Dust Bowl before in a History of the American West, and even though this is technically fiction, some of the evocative passages of getting "tractored out" and the sentiments about the banks getting the land would really resonate with students. This classic proved timeless for me as I read it in the summer of 2025, and its underlying (and sometimes explicit) radicalism still resonated with this reader.
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
The only reason this book is not #1 on my list for the year is because it was not my first time reading it. I love For Whom the Bell Tolls, as I love almost all of Hemingway's writing. He's my favorite author for a reason, though impossible to ever replicate, and this is my second favorite of his works (the Old Man and the Sea takes top honors).
I made it my mission this summer to read or re-read classics, and this was a tragic, if encouraging return to an old favorite. I forgot, on one hand, how difficult the dialogue was to get used to with its antiquated English translations of the old fashioned Spanish--but once you get used to it, the plot and the characters and the message Hemingway wants to tell from the Spanish Civil War carries you away and makes for easy going. I saw new things in this book from when I last read it as an eighteen year old--more truths that Hemingway was trying to convey, and not just the action bits. One haunting quote comes when Robert Jordan, the American, is asked by one of his Spanish compatriots whether or not there are any fascists in his own country. Jordan says "There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes." This warning largely passed unfulfilled during the era of World War Two. Let's hope it continues to remain an unfounded prophesy from one of twentieth-century America's greatest thinkers.
Inspired by his experiences as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the International Brigades fighting to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco. After being ordered to work with guerrilla fighters to destroy a bridge, Jordan finds himself falling in love with a young Spanish woman and clashing with the guerrilla leader over the risks of their mission.
One of the great novels of the twentieth century, For Whom the Bell Tolls was first published in 1940. It powerfully explores the brutality of…
I will admit that I re-read this book because I wasn't sure I truly appreciated it the first time around, when I was compelled to read it in an English class in high school. I enjoyed it, perhaps more, this second time around, but I still prefer Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as my go to hedonistic-post-mortems of the Lost Generation after World War One (see my above comments on Hemingway being my favorite anyway).
But the thing I liked that was new this time around (no need to go into the plot or lessons of such a well-worn book) was that I forgot how much the end-of-the-book sentiments were a nod to the Midwest. As a Midwestern writer who writes almost exclusively about Midwestern and Great Lakes history, I had forgotten this, and I appreciated it with new eyes now. There is something significantly distinct about my home region that Fitzgerald gets, and his explanations of it really stood out to me as he wrapped up his short novel. This is a story of the West, and specifically, about Midwesterners navigating the wider world. That's a fascinating angle that often gets overlooked in this book set in New York, Long Island, and its environs, and one worth sitting with, especially if you are a Midwestern reader.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
Muddy Ground looks at how geography shaped relations between Indigenous peoples and Europeans, zooming in on the localized space of Chicago’s portages from early contact through the 1840s. Part history of early Chicago and part an exploration into Indigenous waterborne networks and ecological knowledge, the book details how the unique freshwater nature of the Great Lakes undergirded the power of Native peoples deep within the continent. The book challenges readers to reconsider the importance of environments in shaping history, because in the end, the United States’ conquest of the interior relied upon a series of environmental disruptions. This overhauling of local geographies, like the waterborne crossroads of Chicago, undermined Indigenous resistance and paved the way for American settlement.
