The book list I try to publish each year — partly to keep track and partly to keep myself honest — is, I’m afraid, a short one again this year.
I’m at least relieved that the number didn’t fall below last year’s [insert self-consolation wrapped in excuses here].
Short as the list is, one book from 2025 deserves its own moment: Zen in the Art of Archery.
My wife found it for me while we were wandering around Hay-on-Wye — the Welsh town known as the “world’s first book town” — and gave it to me as a gift. The book is, in short, about the place of archery in Japanese culture, the discipline it demands, and its relationship with Zen. For someone like me with an interest in both Japanese culture and archery, it was about as well-suited a book as I could have hoped for.
First published in 1948, German philosopher Eugen Herrigel‘s account draws on his six years in Japan studying Zen and the art of archery. He writes about the training and discipline he received from Zen masters during that time, the details of that experience, and the lasting effect it left on him. For anyone with a genuine interest in the subject, it’s a quietly remarkable book.
I’ll leave archery for another post entirely — and keep the promise I made to myself by getting on with the list.
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Books I read in 2025
- Başarısızlığa Övgü: Başarısızlıklar Başarıya Dönüştürülebilir — Mahfi Eğilmez
- Yarının Adamı: Ya İstiklal Ya Ölüm — Con Sinov
- Yarının Adamı: Başkomutan — Con Sinov
- The Lost Continent of Mu — James Churchward
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds — Charles Mackay
- Alamut — Vladimir Bartol
- Suyu Arayan Adam — Şevket Süreyya Aydemir
- Anadolu Manzaraları — Hikmet Birand
- After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency — Quentin Meillassoux
- Zen in the Art of Archery: Training the Mind and Body to Become One — Eugen Herrigel
- Geometri — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
- Kelimenin Ham Anlamıyla — Ali İhsan Varol
Here’s to reading more in 2026. Happy New Year!