2025 in reading

Last year I read 204 books. I don’t count the two ones I had started but hadn’t finished by the time New Year’s Day rolled around; I added those to the 2026 tally.

I am still down an ISIS rabbit hole like last year. (In fact, recently I started creating Wikipedia entries for Westerners who traveled to Syria to join the jihad. This guy, I think, seems more like a devout, naive and idealistic moron than a real terrorist. And this poor girl‘s story is not really about war or terrorism, but human trafficking.) I read several books about ISIS and about terrorism in general. Some notables:

Once Upon a Jihad: Life and Death with the Young and Radicalized by Alex Perry, a short (64 page) narrative nonfiction about a group of British Muslims (led by the devout moron mentioned above) who traveled to their deaths in Syria.

Infatuated with Martyrdom: Female Jihadism from Al-Qaeda to the ‘Islamic State’, which isn’t for sale anywhere but is available for download at the link. It was fascinating to me. Jihad has support from both sexes.

No Return: The True Story of How Martyrs Are Made by Mark Townsend, the story of five teenagers (three of them brothers) who traveled from Brighton in England to Syria to join, not ISIS, but Jabhat Al-Nusra, another jihadist group. (Ahmed Al Sharaa, the current leader of Syria, was a former member of Jabhat al-Nusra.) The book is more about poverty, family violence and marginalization than it is about jihad. In Brighton these were troubled teens and given the background of the brothers in particular, it was understandable how they’d gotten radicalized. Their uncle was wrongly imprisoned in Guatanamo Bay, their father was abusive to them and their mother, and they lived in a very Islamaphobic village where people would throw stones at their house.

The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State by Gina Vale. The author, an anthropologist, based her book on the narratives of ordinary Sunni Muslim and Yazidi women who were not ISIS members but did live under ISIS rule when the terrorist group occupied their towns. It’s a very expensive book but it was worth every penny in my opinion; the stories have stayed in my head since I read it almost a year ago.

In the Shadow of Daesh by Sophie Kasiki. The memoir of a Congolese-French woman who was tricked into traveling to the Islamic State with her son. There are still tens of thousands of ISIS women living in detention camps in Syria today, with nowhere else to go. Many of these women claim they are not terrorists and never supported terrorism and that ISIS recruiters, or their own husbands, tricked them into traveling there. Most of the people making such claims are lying, of course. But Sophie Kasiki, I believe, really was tricked, and she tells the story in this book. She basically wrote her book as a warning to others, saying she had previously been a law-abiding and normal person but got talked into doing something criminal and completely out of character and if could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. You may not feel much sympathy for her (I didn’t, particularly) but it was an enlightening story for me, showing how a person who wasn’t a terrorism supporter might wind up in that situation. After four months in Syria she was able to escape with her son. I’m not sure what happened to her marriage long-term; she had left her husband back in France and lied to him about where she was taking their child, because she knew he wouldn’t let her take the boy to Syria. They were still married as of the book’s publication but I wonder if he ultimately found this to be too much to forgive. I think I would have.

Some other notable books read this year:

I Am a Bacha Posh: My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan by Ukmina Manoori. A bacha posh is an Afghan daughter raised as a son so she can help support the family. This is a long tradition in Afghanistan; the community goes along with the pretense. Most bacha poshes revert to girlhood when they hit puberty and have a normal Afghan woman’s life of marriage, children and isolation within the family home. Not this one. Ukmina is now in her 60s, never married and still walks around in men’s clothes and being called by a man’s name. She has a kind of in-between life and can associate with both men and women without causing any dishonor. In gender apartheid Afghanistan that’s a very unique and powerful position.

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. About life in Communist East Germany; the Stasi were the secret police. Funder interviewed both retired Stasi officers, and their victims. Contains some quite intense stories. I was appalled by how easily some people were willing to turn on their own; the informants weren’t even paid much. But I was also very proud of some of the resistance people in the book, particularly a woman who stood up to the Stasi when they were using her sick and possibly dying infant as leverage against her.

Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl by Michele Zackheim. In the mid-1980s, biographers found a batch of letters written between Einstein and his first wife Mileva Maric before they were married. The letters discussed a pregnancy and the birth of a daughter in 1902, whom the couple named Lieserl. This was the first time the public ever knew Einstein had a daughter; due to her illegitimacy, Lieserl had been kept secret. In the 1990s, Michele Zackheim went to war-torn Serbia (where Mileva was from) to try to find out what happened to that secret child. I already knew what the ending would be because I looked at the Wikipedia entry for Einstein’s family and it has a section about Lieserl. But I really enjoyed the story of the search, the people Zackheim met along the way, the possible Lieserl candidates whose lives she examined looking for clues, etc. And I enjoyed learning about Mileva, who was a very intelligent person in her own right and who may have helped Einstein with some of his scientific work.

First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Peter Eichstaedt. So remember #Kony2012? Kony is the still at large head of the still-extant Lord’s Resistance Army, one of the most evil organizations I ever heard of, and the LRA is what this book is about. The LRA would invade villages and remote farms, steal the money and property, murder the adults, kidnap the children and teenagers, and absorb them into the LRA as soldiers, porters and sex slaves. What was particularly evil about them in my opinion is they would force their underage abductees to commit atrocities against their own families and communities, which discouraged the abductees from trying to run away from the LRA out of fear that they would not be accepted back home. To give just one example: the book talked about a seventeen-year-old boy who was forced to kill his own parents after the LRA showed up at their farmstead. His parents cooperated, told him he’d better do it because they were dead either way and if he did what the LRA said he might live. The boy escaped from the LRA two years later, and his surviving family members wouldn’t take him back. His presence was simply too triggering for them to tolerate. He went to live in a refugee camp by himself. In addition to describing the atrocities the LRA committed, the author also talks about the unfortunate geopolitical situation which allowed the LRA to continue to exist and menace multiple African countries for as long as it did.

Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor. This year I also went down a Khmer Rouge rabbit hole and read like ten books on the subject. This is the best one, and probably the best known as well, because after he moved to the US Haing Ngor starred in “The Killing Fields”, a movie about the genocide. The book not only tells his personal story, but also explains the wider geopolitical context that led to the KR takeover. It also talks about after the war and Haing Ngor’s experiences in the US, starring in the movie and trying to rebuild his life. This book, I will warn you, contains the most graphic and intimate descriptions of torture I’ve ever read. Haing actually put what we would now call “trigger warnings” in the book each time he got arrested. He was like “So this chapter is going to be horrific and if you don’t want to read it feel free to skip to the next chapter.” A collaborator who knew him before the revolution for him arrested by the KR three times on suspicion of being a doctor (they killed the doctors, and all the educated people), and Haing was tortured in all sorts of awful and inventive ways each time, including being crucified, because he wouldn’t admit he was a doctor.

After I Was Raped, Episode Two: Getting to safety and calling the cops

This is the second in a post series about what happened after I was raped in 2009.

So the man who raped me gave me a name, when he first met me. Afterwards, though, I called him by a name I chose. I knew the name he’d given me was no more likely to be his real name than any other, and I got tired of calling him “the man who raped me” so I started calling him Rollo.

I chose the name “Rollo” from the movie L.A. Confidential. A character’s dad was murdered by someone who was never identified, and the character referred to the unknown killer as Rollo Tomasi, “just to give him some personality.” So I named my rapist Rollo too, just to give him some personality. I’ve called him Rollo since 2009.

When Rollo let me go, we were in the woods at the edge of a supermarket parking lot across the street from the apartment building where my friend, Jeff, lived. He pointed the building out to me and told me goodbye.

I started walking across the parking lot towards the street. I forced myself not to run because I knew he did not believe I would report the attack and if I started running, like I was scared, maybe he’d change his mind and chase after me and catch me. So I walked at a leisurely pace across the lot, across the street, and into my friend’s building. Inside I ran upstairs to his apartment. The door was unlocked and he was inside at his computer in his office. I walked into the apartment and before I actually reached the room he was in I started explaining, “Jeff, we are going to have to call the police. I’ve been raped.”

“What?!” Jeff said. I repeated what I had said. “Where is he?” he asked. I said I didn’t know and he’d left me at the supermarket parking lot across the street.

Jeff ran out of the apartment and I went chasing after him, not sure what he was doing. Jeff, followed by me, ran down the stairs and out into the apartment building parking lot and to the street. Jeff glanced around at the edge of the street, then turned and ran back to his apartment. Once we both got back inside we called 911 and I briefly explained what happened.

The cops arrived. A woman uniformed officer took my initial report. I was shaking all over. There were other cops in the apartment and I saw and heard Jeff talking to them. They asked him if he was my boyfriend and he said no, just a friend. They asked if he’d ever had sex with me. He said no. They asked me the same questions and I said no, we’d never had sex, and my boyfriend was back home in Ohio.

From what Jeff told the police: there was a bus stop right in front of the apartment building. Jeff had thought maybe the rapist was waiting for the bus. So he ran out to try to get him, or at least see him.

I had arrived at Jeff’s apartment hours later than he had expected me. I had not been responding to his texts. He had finally called me, and I answered and we had a very short conversation and I told him everything was fine and I’d be at his apartment in ten minutes. Jeff knew everything wasn’t fine. He was chatting with some friend online and said, “I hope Meaghan has not been kidnapped.”

During the minutes after our phone conversation and before I arrived at his apartment Jeff had tried to make himself better by loading and unloading his handgun. He had it loaded when I finally got there (about ten minutes later as Rollo had told me to say), and took it with him when he ran outside. If Rollo had been at the bus stop, Jeff freely admitted to me and police, he would have shot him. I’m glad Jeff did not get the opportunity to shoot him as that would have been extremely inconvenient.

The police told him they were glad they did not have to arrest him. They took the gun away for the time being; I remember one officer said into his walkie-talkie, “We have secured the firearm.” I’m not sure when they returned it to him, but they must have done as it was registered to him and legal and all.

During my statement to the female uniformed officer who took my report, we were sitting in Jeff’s spare room which was usually his office; he had his computer in there and he had a twin bed shoved in a corner for me to sleep on and a wooden screen set up to divide the sleeping area. Through the window I saw a lot of police cars gather outside. I heard the uniformed officers talk and I heard one say, “This is exactly who I thought it would be.”

At some point through all of this the police asked me if I could go back to the woods by the supermarket and show them the exact spot where Rollo had raped me for the last time. I said I could, and was escorted to the edge of the woods in a squad car. There was a walking path going into the woods and this was Rollo had left me. The sexual assault had occurred on a bench by this path. I led the officers past the first bench we encountered; I hadn’t remembered passing it but looked at it and knew this was not the right one. I identified the second bench and pointed out that there was a condom wrapper, white in color as I had previously described, under this bench. The police decided they’d have an officer guard the area until daylight, then bring in people to process the scene. We returned to Jeff’s apartment.

At some point during the evening, my mom called to ask how my day at the US Holocaust Museum had been. As I was in the middle of making a police report I didn’t feel like having a long conversation. I pretended everything was fine and made an excuse: I said I had a great day but couldn’t talk as Jeff and I were in the middle of watching a movie. I told her I would call tomorrow.

For my trip, I had planned to crash at Jeff’s during the evenings and visit museums and other tourist areas at nearby Washington DC during the day. On the day I was raped, I had gone into Washington DC and visited the Holocaust musem and bought books at the gift shop. But I had been on the way back to Jeff’s via multiple subway and bus stops when I got lost. I was from the middle of nowhere in Ohio and had never tried to figure out public transport in the city on my own before this trip.

I still had the museum books, in their plastic bag. During the initial struggle with Rollo I had dropped them. He helped me pick them up once he was satisfied he had me under his control. I offered the cops the books, and the plastic bag. Rollo had touched them, I said. They might have prints on them. The cops said no. They didn’t explain why they didn’t want the books; I can only assume the surfaces wouldn’t have yielded good prints. I kept the books. I believe I might still have them, either that I donated them to the library as I often do after having read a book to clear up space on the shelf.

I emphasized to the police I was willing to look at photo lineups or work with a sketch artist or do whatever it took to do to identify the man who raped me. I said that I was afraid he would attack other women if not caught. Inside I was not optimistic about my ability to identify the attacker by sight as he was a stranger and I am very very bad with faces. Nothing in particular about him stood out save his pronounced foreign accent. What accent it was, was unfamiliar to me; I’d never heard any similar accent before.

A detective named Austin arrived. Austin explained we had to go to the hospital to get a rape kit done and to pack another set of clothes cause they needed mine for evidence. Before we did that we had to go to the police station because the police had arrested someone and they wanted me to look at him. Austin explained that the man had seen the cops looking for the rapist and he ran. They chased after him, stopped him and found a small amount of weed, illegal at the time but they thought it was suspicious the man ran just over a joint in a pocket. He resembled my description of Rollo, whom I had said had offered to smoke weed with me (I declined). The police wanted me to look and they would do it in such a way as the man would not see me.

So I rode to the police station in Austin’s car. Jeff was left behind at the apartment. I was no longer shaking by this time but I was acting very autistic, as I tend to do when I’m under extreme stress. I have an autism diagnosis and all the behaviors really come out when I’m really upset and stressed. In this case I was having inappropriate social behaviors like laughing about the incident even though it wasn’t in the least bit funny.

I never actually got out of the car at the police station. Instead Austin pulled up out front, in the dark parking lot, and the man was brought out, in handcuffs, under the streetlight, by a group of cops. Austin asked, “Could this be him?” I immediately said no, this was definitely not him. He asked, “Why not?”

I said, “He’s too tall, he’s way too tall.” I reminded him that in my statements I said the rapist was about exactly my own height, which happens to be five foot six. The man the police had arrested was taller than most of the cops escorting him and obviously at least six feet tall. He and my rapist were both clean-shaven, un-tattooed young black men with short hair, but even besides the height issue he didn’t really look like Rollo at all.

Austin said okay, and told the other cops that, and the man was escorted back inside to face his weed and running from police charge.