Originally published on eve.gd on 16 December 2025, last updated 6 September 2026.
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As is my custom, I am writing, for my own historical logging, to show what I read and wrote this year. This year I have been working at Knowledge Commons, which has been a great environment with lovely people and a worthwhile project. It has meant that much of my time has been consumed with technical matters as is proper, but I did still manage to get up early in the morning and write.
Kidney stuff has continued to blight me this year. I continue to need a huge amount of dialysis every week, 32 hours or so at present. But doing this overnight means that my days are free and I can continue to work and enjoy the things that I do. The other real problem with kidney failure is the near constant nausea that you get as toxins accumulate in your body. But also dialysis causes nausea in itself. So it’s a bit of a challenging situation in many ways.
Perhaps the highlight of 2025 for me was receiving the SHARP DeLong Prize for Book History from the Society of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. This is a massive honour and makes me feel vindicated in my choices around my book, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital Textual History. I will be doing a special event with SHARP next year focusing on this book and I hope as many of you as possible can join me.
I also wanted to share a list of my own publications and other work from the past year.
As 2025 draws to a close, I’m also taking a moment to reflect on the books that I have read this year. It’s been a diverse reading experience, spanning contemporary fiction to analyses of technology and history. I also read a LOT of books about Star Trek for my work, PhD theses for examination/supervision, and other books that didn’t make this list of “reading for fun”.
Cover | No. | Title/Author
1 | Orbital, Harvey, Samantha
2 | Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory, Milligan, Ian
3 | The Proof of My Innocence, Coe, Jonathan
4 | Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700, McKitterick, David
5 | Stories of Your Life and Others, Chiang, Ted
6 | Exhalation: Stories, Chiang, Ted
7 | The Happiness of Dogs: Why the Unexamined Life Is Most Worth Living, Rowlands, Mark
8 | The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver, Barbara
9 | Flight Behaviour, Kingsolver, Barbara
10 | Unsheltered, Kingsolver, Barbara
11 | Book manuscript for The MIT Press
12 | The Lacuna, Kingsolver, Barbara
13 | PhD thesis for examination at the University of Brighton
14 | Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy, Collier, Ben
15 | The Frozen People, Griffiths, Elly
16 | Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on FreeNet, Tor, and I2P, Gehl, Robert W.
17 | Eleanor Marx: A Life, Holmes, Rachel
18 | The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels, Friedrich
19 | PhD thesis for student
20 | Binding Media. Hybrid Print-Digital Literatures from across the Americas, Ortega, Elika
21 | Book manuscript for review for Stanford UP
22 | Book manuscript for review for University of London Press
23 | Exploring Star Trek: Voyager: Critical Essays, Lively, Robert L., ed.
24 | The Life of Rachel Speght: A Forward Woman, Stringer, Helen M.
25 | Cambridge MPhil dissertations for adjudication
26 | The Dark Net, Bartlett, Jamie
27 | Shadow Ticket, Pynchon, Thomas
So there, said the mayor, that’s that.
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. Knowledge Commons <https://hcommons.org>