Reading Through America's Century: My 2025 Project
A day before the US 2024 election results, I promised to do a reading project. The premise is simple — I want to go through biographies of all American presidents of the XX century. If you’re into book part of the internet, it may sound familiar. There’s a blog called “My journey through the best presidential biographies,”documenting good reads on 45 Oval Office leaders. Over 260 books went into it, and I’m a fan.
My motivation is slightly different, hence the narrowed scope. Pre-XX presidents are influential, and I will study them too, but not continuously.
As a Ukrainian, the US elections are a second-to-none event for me due to possible consequences. It’s hard to convey the urgency and importance they carry. Territory, sovereignty, personal and national future, and the fate of other European nations could be at stake. But, as Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life could only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
History doesn’t repeat itself, but the story of the last century and its American leadership could illustrate and help me grasp America’s current state. Valuable practical intelligence hinges on pattern recognition. The XX century — again, the first American century — holds distinctive patterns, making it the best learning ground. Global wars, domestic economic crashes, rise and fall of industrial giants, tariffs and deportations, assassinated and rogue presidents. Their extradionary power and limitations has both been tested.
There’s also utility. Europe is declining as a major player, but more importantly, Europe doesn’t have a single point of power — the Union governance structure is complex and distributed. So is the writing about its formation. At the national level, past Churchill (just bought his "definitive" biography by M. Gilbert) and De Gaulle, there are few exceptional individuals who influenced the world — and those two already explain the EU’s formation. I feel freer to take my European reading in a more relaxed manner.
From nodes to cohesion
Another reason why I’m drawn to this 2025 reading project to break the “bad” habit. My reading is plagued by a “node mode,” where I build hyperlinked connections between random things.
Let me illustrate. When reading Roland Allen’s “The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper,” I was intrigued by a story about Hemingway’s lost notebooks from Paris, found years later and used in the opening chapters of “A Moveable Feast.” It was a nice story, covering just about a chapter in a dense, history-rich narrative from Renaissance Italy to Newton’s and Darwin’s personal books.
But I went and read the “Moveable Feast”. I also found out what Allen’s description probably false — the Ritz-Hotel Papers, if they existed, probably didn’t contribute to the novel. I’ll link a PDF with a detailed dive.
So far, so good. I’ve learned something new. But I couldn’t stop my mind when it submerged into this mode. So I went into the haphazard exploration of American writers living in Paris in the 1920s, moving into French intellectuals, singled out (for some reason) Jacques Derrida, read his “Monolingualism of the Other” and ended up perplexed and mildly exhausted.
Of course, I’m not always inconsistent and enjoy roaming around. But I also want to focus and up my knowledge, which is not poor, but very inconsistent. “The first rule is to read little,” says A. D. Sertillanges in “The Intellectual Life,” and that is underappreciated, puzzling advice. “What we are proscribing is the passion for reading, the uncontrolled habit, the poisoning of the mind by excess of mental food, the laziness in disguise which prefers easy familiarity with others’ thought to personal effort,” he explains, laying out the dangers of intellectual gluttony. To read effectively, you need to synthesize your own thoughts, and have a proper density of material boiling in your head.
Reading presidential biographies opens a perfect opportunity for this. It’s a single story with enough overlaps and continuity, and even if one ventures aside, it’s easy to steer back.
There are arguments against it. Seventeen US presidents served during the XX century, but I’ll skip McKinley (1897-1901) and start from Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). Many are covered extensively, and my goal isn’t to read every biography. Instead, I’ll focus on one or two well-researched works per president. Major exceptions for FDR (no explanation needed) and LBJ (because Caro). Completing this by 2025 will require a fast reading pace, sidelining other inquiries. But if I miss this arbitrary timeline, it’s not a problem. It’s better than consuming a gazillion terminally online takes on the US presidency.
I wonder how many more reading projects I can undertake in my lifetime. I’m 26, and I’m not satisfied with my knowledge on many things, mainly (but not exclusively) history, politics, and exploration of progress. Roman Empire, rise and fall of British Empire, history of Japan and China, a dive into Ukrainian history. Then there’s my obsession with the atomic bomb story — from “The Theoretical Minimum” series to dozens of biographies.
It’s a classical self-awareness curse: knowing there’s too much to learn while being aware of time’s limitations. Hence, “the first rule is to read little.”
Notes and forewords
I’ll track my progress (or failure) on this journey here, starting early January with "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" and "Colonel Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris.
Most of my reading will be on Kindle, but I’ll sum up the project’s total cost in both digital and physical purchases. My notes will focus on surprising things, not broad observations and grand historical parallels. Stick around for what’s coming.
Also, check out my Notes on reading from 2023, covering some previous highlights and note-taking approach.