And then, there's a bearded fetus.

(This is the promised separate review of my favorite book from 2025.)

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer is not simply my favorite book of the year, but is my candidate for Best Book of the Year overall. This is not simply a book about history but is a book about the process of history. It demonstrates the fractal messiness of the people, places, and events that we try to tidily sort into specific eras, and especially how all those people, places, and events are braided together into a solid fabric. Palmer doesn’t shy away from pointing out how thoroughly our understanding of history is shaped by the prejudices and preoccupations of historians; she embraces this aspect noting at every turn how her own take is shaped by her love of the city of Florence and especially its most controversial son, Machiavelli.

But what makes this book great is the humor poured into the cracks around the politics, violence, and art. (A recurring feature is little comic dialogues that summarize key events in a narrative style familiar to anyone on Twitter or Bluesky. I desperately want to see these presented in visual format, whether as live theater or animated shorts. It’s hard to pick a favorite line, but the top two are “Maria Visconti-Sforza: I’m standing right here!” and “King of France: You Italians are very strange.”)

The book concludes with what I can only describe as a stump speech for the importance to the contemporary world of studying and understanding history, embracing the necessary messiness of “progress,” and the hope that we can indeed continue the Renaissance project of reaching for a better world.

This is a very long book, though paced in manageable chapters. When I decided to read it and found that the audiobook was the same price as the hardcover, I went for audio (at over 30 hours!) and listened to it while taking the train home from the International Medieval Conference. The narration is top-notch, capturing the emotional range of the text perfectly. The side benefit is that the combination of material, voice, and length made it perfect to add to my “sleep-aid audiobooks” collection, which means I get to enjoy it over and over again (in the bits and pieces I consciously hear). But of course I bought the hardcover too, not only so I could get Palmer to autograph it, but because I needed to be able to track down my favorite bits and check out the footnotes.