MIT Press

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2024 in Review – Top 8 Books

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2024 in Review – Top 8 Books

I like to set myself a goal for the number of books I will read in a given year. In previous years this was fifty books, but I found that this constrained my choices as I often passed over big doorstopper volumes because they take too long to read which could imperil my chance of reaching my target. In 2023 I dropped my goal to forty books and barely hit that target, and 2024 proved to be an exact repeat – sliding in to the finish in the last weeks of December. For 2025 I may drop down to thirty-five to allow even more room for the kind of dense books I enjoy. However, I am also hoping to read more fiction, which generally goes much faster than the kinds of history I usually read. I’ve recently been getting more review copies of academic books which has been great (academic books are expensive!) but it also means I’m reading more dense history books and I need to put some more lighter fair in there as well.

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

Few books have impacted me quite as much as the first edition of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World. A 700 page self-published brick of a history on the origins and influences of Dungeons and Dragons was exactly the kind of deep nerd lore that I craved. I devoured it while working on my PhD, and even snuck in a little reference to it on my footnotes. Now long out of print, it was a book I would recommend but with many caveats around people having to really be into this kind of thing specifically. Thankfully, Peterson has seen fit to put together a revised second edition, now available via MIT Press, and Playing at the World has never been so approachable. While a weirdo like me can’t help but miss some of the first edition’s idiosyncrasies, even I must admit that this is altogether a more polished history of the origins of D&D and roleplaying games in general.

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Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

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Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

We’re living through a particularly excellent time for scholarship on Dungeon’s and Dragons, and this latest edited volume from MIT Press is a real showcase for the vibrancy of that scholarship. I’ll confess that sometimes these edited volumes make me a little concerned – it’s a real challenge to keep a book like this on theme while simultaneously ensuring that each chapter (twenty in total in this case) is interesting to anyone who might pick it up. That’s not to say that other edited volumes I’ve read have been bad – but rather that I often find myself enjoying at most one-third of these kinds of books with many of the other articles just being okay or simply not relevant to my interests. Given the range of fields on display in Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons I expected to find parts of it to be a bit of a drag, and while I cannot claim that I loved them all equally I found myself enjoying every single one of the book’s chapters. This is an excellent edited volume with plenty to offer anyone interested in the history, study, and culture of Dungeons and Dragons.