My Reading list for 2025: The Non-Fiction Works

Yesterday, I shared my 2025 reading list, featuring a selection of 15 novels that I’m excited to explore. In that same post, I mentioned my intention to also share a list of non-fiction works I plan to dive into during the year. These texts span a variety of disciplines—including history, theology, and sociology—and tackle compelling themes such as freedom, tyranny, nationalism, colonialism, authoritarianism, resistance, revolution, and democracy. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you 20 non-fiction books that I’ve carefully curated. Each one promises to challenge conventional thinking, provoke meaningful dialogue, and inspire actions that contribute to human flourishing. Through this reading journey, I hope to engage deeply with the authors’ ideas and the transformative messages they offer, sparking insights that resonate both personally and collectively.

1. The Intellectual Devotional by David S. Kidder & Noah Oppenheim

2. A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future by Charles Van Doren

3. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of how Classical Ideas were Lost and Found by Violet Moller

4. The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence by Thomas Jay Oord

5. Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization by Marianne Moyaert

6. The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers: Learning to Interpret Scripture from the Prophets and Apostles by Abner Chou

7. The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

8. Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination by Darlene Elizabeth Dubuisson

9. I have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom by Julia Gaffield

10. Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Decolonial Imagination by Natalie Marie Leger

11. Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti by Jake Johnston

12. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

13. How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

14. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

15. On Freedom by Timothy Snyder

16. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi

17. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness by Rashid Khalidi

18. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

19. Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE Christopher Ehret

20. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari