I was dissatisfied with my 2015 reading. A number of projects and situations contrived to cut down my reading time drastically, and so this list feels even more provisional than most years, a grab-bag of things that stood out for me stood out for me personally rather than a considered ranking. I think in a better world we would all do books of a given year 5 to 10 years down the line, and the resulting lists would be far more well-considered. Maybe 25 or 50 years would be even better.
I was pulled into a number of projects and situations that obliterated both my concentration and reading time, the biggest being my Facilitated Communication investigation, which consumed an entire quarter of the year. That would not have been so bad by itself but a handful of other similar matters made it difficult to do as much comprehensive reading as I would have liked. I’ve resolved to change that this year.
So, wish a bit of disappointment and shame, I am attaching a “Promising Nonfiction” section of books I haven’t yet assessed. These are books that due to their subject matter, pedigree, author, or some other factor struck me as being worth investigating, but which I didn’t have time to do so. Note that it is entirely possible that some of these books are terrible–they just merit a look in my mind. (Example: Cesar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows would have been on the promising list, but I did get time to take a look at it and it did not fulfill its promise. On the other hand, I am near-certain Noel Malcolm’s latest tome of scholarship is brilliant, but simply didn’t have time to get to a work so far outside outside my current area of focus.) If any readers have opinions on them, please chime in.
Book of the Year
The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory (New Directions in German Studies)
Hans Blumenberg
Bloomsbury Academic
Fiction
Thought Flights
Robert Musil
Contra Mundum Press
The Blizzard: A Novel
Vladimir Sorokin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector
New Directions
The Complete Works of Primo Levi
Primo Levi
Liveright
Horse of a Different Color: Stories
Howard Waldrop
Small Beer Press
The Librarian
Mikhail Elizarov
Pushkin Press
A School for Fools (New York Review Books Classics)
Sasha Sokolov
NYRB Classics
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths
Barbara Comyns
NYRB Classics
Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories (NYRB Classics)
Silvina Ocampo
NYRB Classics
A General Theory of Oblivion
Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Archipelago
The Wake: A Novel
Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf Press
Kvachi (Georgian Literature)
Mikheil Javakhishvili, Mixeil Javaxiesvili
Dalkey Archive Press
Eyes: Novellas and Stories
William H. Gass
Knopf
Book of Numbers: A Novel
Joshua Cohen
Random House
The Door (NYRB Classics)
Magda Szabo
NYRB Classics
Callimachus: The Hymns
Oxford University Press
Silvina Ocampo (New York Review Books Poets)
Silvina Ocampo
NYRB Poets
Eileen: A Novel
Ottessa Moshfegh
Penguin Press
A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel
Marlon James
Riverhead Books
The Tale of Genji
Shikibu Murasaki
W. W. Norton & Company
Macbeth: Third Series (Arden Shakespeare)
William Shakespeare
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult
Bohumil Hrabal
New Directions
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (New York Review Books Classics)
Bohumil Hrabal
NYRB Classics
The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (Hackett Classics)
Jackson Crawford
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Incidents in the Night Book 2
David B.
Uncivilized Books
Dungeon: Monstres – Vol. 5: My Son the Killer
Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim
NBM Publishing
Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer
Sylvie Rancourt
Drawn and Quarterly
The Eternaut
Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Francisco Solano Lopez
Fantagraphics
Fatherland: A Family History
Nina Bunjevac
Liveright
Nonfiction
World Philology
Harvard University Press
Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science
Martin Meisel
Columbia University Press
The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
Justin Peters
Scribner
The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz
The New Press
Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton Legacy Library)
Rosalie Littell Colie
Princeton University Press
Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (Theorists of Myth)
Angus Nicholls
Routledge
The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter
Myles Burnyeat, Michael Frede
Oxford University Press
The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution
Timothy Tackett
Belknap Press
Physics: a short history from quintessence to quarks
J. L. Heilbron
Oxford University Press
Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology
Kentaro Toyama
PublicAffairs
Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine
Andrew Scull
Princeton University Press
Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations
Douwe Draaisma
Yale University Press
Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
John Merriman
Basic Books
Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
Philip N. Howard
Yale University Press
The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
Pedro Domingos
Basic Books
The World the Game Theorists Made
Paul Erickson
University Of Chicago Press
The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (The Princeton History of the Ancient World)
Josiah Ober
Princeton University Press
Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural
Shadi Bartsch
University Of Chicago Press
European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche
Frank M. Turner
Yale University Press
Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics
Rudolf A. Makkreel
University of Chicago Press
The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement
Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky
Oxford University Press
Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History
Bernard Bailyn
Knopf
Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s “Aeneid”
W. R. Johnson
University Of Chicago Press
Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science)
David Sloan Wilson
Yale University Press
The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution
Tony Hey, Gyuri Pápay
Cambridge University Press
Greek Models of Mind and Self (Revealing antiquity ;)
Anthony A. Long
Harvard University Press
Track-Two Diplomacy toward an Israeli-Palestinian Solution, 1978-2014
Yair Hirschfeld
Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
Bruce Schneier
W. W. Norton & Company
The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973
Mark Greif
Princeton University Press
The Cybernetics Moment (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History)
Ronald R. Kline
Johns Hopkins University Press
Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe (Science Essentials)
Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Simon Mitton
Princeton University Press
Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (New York Review Books Classics)
Friedrich Nietzsche
NYRB Classics
Promising Nonfiction
Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World
Noel Malcolm
Oxford University Press
The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
Aldon Morris
University of California Press
Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity
Rebecca Lemov
Yale University Press
A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role
John A. Thompson
Cornell University Press
Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State (The Institution for Social and Policy St)
Samuel DeCanio
Yale University Press
Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance
Adair Turner
Princeton University Press
Realpolitik: A History
John Bew
Oxford University Press
Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco
Lawrence Rosen
University Of Chicago Press
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller
Princeton University Press
Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present
David A. Bell
Oxford University Press
Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World
Leif Wenar
Oxford University Press
A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change – and the Limits of Evolution
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Oxford University Press
We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination
Russell Rickford
Oxford University Press
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945
Nicholas Stargardt
Basic Books
The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West 1914–1945
Heinrich August Winkler
Yale University Press
A Country Called Prison: Mass Incarceration and the Making of a New Nation
Mary D. Looman, John D. Carl
Oxford University Press
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
W. W. Norton & Company
Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers (The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies)
N. Henry Rothschild
Columbia University Press
Stem Cell Dialogues: A Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry Into Medical Frontiers
Sheldon Krimsky
Columbia University Press
The Political Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus (The Rostovtzeff Lectures)
Adam T. Smith
Princeton University Press
The Black Mirror: Looking at Life through Death
Raymond Tallis
Yale University Press
Violence All Around
John Sifton
Harvard University Press
Barbarism and Religion: Volume 6, Barbarism: Triumph in the West
J. G. A. Pocock
Cambridge University Press
The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
Daniel A. Bell
Princeton University Press
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
Nikolaus Wachsmann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity
James J. O’Donnell
Ecco
Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa
Scott Straus
Cornell University Press
“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)
Ronald Grigor Suny
Princeton University Press
Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin of Species from the Nineteenth Century Through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond
Niles Eldredge
Columbia University Press
China Under Mao
Andrew G. Walder
Harvard University Press
Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947
Bruce Hoffman
Knopf
The Third Reich in History and Memory
Richard J. Evans
Oxford University Press
The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East
Eugene Rogan
Basic Books
The Art of Peacemaking: Political Essays by István Bibó (World Thought in Translation)
István Bibó
Yale University Press
Very Different, But Much the Same: The Evolution of English Society Since 1714
W. G. Runciman
Oxford University Press
The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution
Christopher Hill
Endeavour Press
State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford Studies in Early Empires)
Oxford University Press
The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism
David M. Kotz
Harvard University Press
The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
David Wootton
Harper
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
Andrea Wulf
Knopf
Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes
Richard Davenport-Hines
Basic Books
The Country of First Boys: And Other Essays
Amartya Sen
Oxford University Press
The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve (Evolution and Cognition)
H. Clark Barrett
Oxford University Press
Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present
James H. S. McGregor
Yale University Press
The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore
Michael Dylan Foster
University of California Press
Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century
Konrad H. Jarausch
Princeton University Press