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:
July:
August:
September:
October:
November:
December: