Contraptions Book Club
The theme for the 2025 book club is Contraptionist History. We will read a set of history books selected to explore the thesis that the story of civilization 1200-1600 AD is best understood as the construction of the first civilization-scale machine. Each book will be discussed during the last week of the corresponding month, in a dedicated chat thread.
As an incentive, for each book you finish, you will get one month of comped subscription. If you’re a paid subscriber, this will be added to your subscription. I will do a round of credits at the end of June 2025 after we finish 6 books, and another in January 2026.
Please log your reading as you go in this Google form. I highly recommend you maintain a publicly viewable page of notes/reviews on the readings as you go. You can share the link through the logging form for others. Here is my notes page for reference. Stretch goal — to feed all our notes into an LLM at the end of the year to synthesize.
2025 Picks
January: City of Fortune by Roger Crowley. Chat.
Extra credit read: Venice: A New History, by Thomas Madden.
February: Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz. Chat.
March: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates. Chat.
April: Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin. Chat.
May: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth S. Eisenstein. Chat.
June: Monkey King: Journey to the West, choose either the unabridged Jenner edition or the abridged Lovell edition (recommended). Chat.
July: Side-quest month: Pick your own book relevant to 1200-1600. You can pick from the side-quest list if you like, or find your own book.
August: Elective month: Choose from: Canterbury Tales, Decameron, Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. Pick your edition/translation carefully.
September: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays. Chat.
October: Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire by Harold van der Linde. Chat.
November: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann.
December: Utopia by Thomas More. Chat.
Side Quests
Relatively expensive and detailed books that you might want to read on the side.
Slaves on Horses by Patricia Crone
Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Dougles E. Streusend
Before European Hegemony by Janet L. Abu-Lughod
Kingdoms of Faith by Brian A. Catlos
Ocean of Churn by Sanjeev Sanyal
The Chivalric Turn by David Crouch
Zheng He: China And the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433 by Edward L. Dreyer
Vijayanagara by Burton Stein
Empires of the monsoon: A history of the Indian Ocean and its invaders by Richard Hall
When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the ‘Riches of the East’ by Stewart Gordon