Thanks for reading my free newsletter! If you’d like to support my work, buying or gifting HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY would be wonderful. Excellent free ways to support me include: borrowing HUMANS from your library or recommending they buy it; reviewing the book on, say, Amazon, Goodreads, or Storygraph (the links take you to the Humans pages); adding it to your wish list or TBR list; or telling friends, family, colleagues, or students about it.

Hallo friends, and welcome, new readers!

Today’s offering is a patchwork, a contrast to last week’s Frankenstein essay:

• Book news

• What I’m reading

• New Year’s Resolutions

• Subscriber-only gift essay coming up!

Book news

Humans: A Monstrous History made the History Today Books of the Year 2025 list! Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth described the book as one of the “books that will stay with me long past 2025.” Demuth writes that:

Humans: A Monstrous History “is creative and deeply serious, winding a path from primordial gods to zombies and large language models. Davies shows how the concept of monstrousness helped create the categories of who is human and who is not that undergird contemporary inequality. It is a history of why we make monsters – and what might happen if we cease to.”

And Humans: A Monstrous History was quoted in The New Yorker! HOW COOL IS THAT?!?! Anthropologist Manvir Singh wrote an essay on modern monsters and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and quoted my definition of monsters as beings that fall “across or outside the categories of ‘normal’ people or beings in the world.” I’m now sacrificing ladybugs in the hope that they publish my letter about the essay in “The Mailbag” or ask me to write something else for them. Goalz!

Earlier this month I gave an online talk for the Linda Hall Library (science, engineering, medicine) in Kansas City, MO. I’m an alum of their fellowship program; a virtual fellowship supported the final months of working on Humans (so grateful for this support!). You can catch up with the lecture on the library’s YouTube channel at this link.

My next confirmed book event is a lecture at the Linnean Society, London, on the evening of Thursday March 5^th. If you might be in the neighbourhood, do keep your diaries free — and tell your frens! I’ll share signup details when the event page is ready.

If you’re heading to the American Historical Association annual meeting in Chicago, IL, I shall not be there, but Humans will! Do head over to the University of California Press book display in the conference exhibit hall, to booth 314. In addition to handling the wonderful hardback of Humans, you’ll be able to order it and a bunch of other great books at a discount — including, perhaps, the paperback of Humans, which comes out on March 17^th! UC Press staff are fantastic and friendly, so if you have questions about getting published, don’t be shy about approaching them.

Readers in the US and Canada can get a 30% discount on almost all UCP Press books (if already published or coming out within six weeks), by typing UCPSAVE30 at the checkout when ordering online from the press. Head to the UCP page for Humans (for example), click “Buy” on the right-hand side, and choose “UC Press” from the dropdown menu.

If you’re based outside the US or Canada, options for using the code are on my website here.

What I’m reading

Multi-tasking book-reading (multi-reading?) has gotten out of control this fall, but I’m looking forward to at least two weeks’ off when reading fun books and playing with my cookbooks will feature strongly.

I’m halfway through David Grann’s The Wager, a jaw-dropping history of a maritime misadventure involving sailing around Cape Horn (southern Patagonia) in apocalyptic storms, shipwrecks, Personnel Drama, and more. I’m also halfway through Kate Beales’s debut, Broken Horses, a delicately beautiful, captivating historical novel set in 1920s southern Patagonia (again!). I’m 439pp through R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis, a dark academia novel in which two grad students descend through the circles of hell to rescue their advisor (who perished in a lab accident) so that he can write them letters of recommendation for the job market.

I actually finished a book this fall, too: Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky, a vivid historical novel across four timelines, tracing the intertwined lives touched by a single drop of water. The novel is set against backdrops of real historical events, which is often thrilling and sometimes (in the case of the worst sort of historical event) a disturbing, if important, read.

New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time again. I don’t have the bandwidth to make any resolutions until I’ve had a break - and you may be feeling the same. I’ll be musing on some of my earlier newsletters about habits and the creative brain. I need to do what I say, not just say it and then run around like a troupe of Muppets. Here are some newsletters from the backlist for when you get around to your own resolution-planning:

On what I learned about work, rest, and play during the book tour.

The coach, the cataloguer, and the chaos muppet — the many heads of an author.

Sometimes habits for a past life aren’t the right habits for the present. Some thoughts on habits: the good, the bad, and the pointless.

And if you’d like to putter around the whole of my newsletter archive, it’s here.

Subscriber gift!

I’m wrapping up this newsletter until the New Year, but I’ll be starting 2026 with a special issue, a thank-you gift just for subscribers! In this era of central algorithms controlling almost all social media platforms (Bluesky is, for now, one that doesn’t have such a thing), the most reliable way to reach readers is via a newsletter. Your subscription to Notes from an Everything Historian means I have a way to get my writing to you no matter what platforms explode or become enshittified (to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage of the century) in future.

I drafted most of the gift essay this morning - 1,500 words and counting! It’s called Behind the Smithsonian Essay: it’s the story behind my first essay in Smithsonian Magazine: about the painting of hell at the top of this section. This gift will be coming your way via email at the start of 2026.

If you know anyone who might appreciate it, feel free to forward to them the newsletter you’re currently reading, and to suggest that they sign up so that they receive the essay when it goes out.