Books I’ve read in 2011

Thought I’d do this again. I read 27 books last year, almost exclu­sive­ly on my Kin­dle. Below is a list, in order of fin­ish date (lat­est first). I high­light­ed five favorites and pro­vid­ed a bit of commentary.

• How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost
• Lady of Mazes, Karl Schroeder
• The Well-Played Game, Bernie DeKoven¹
• The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
• Crit­i­cal Play, Mary Flanagan
• The Scar, Chi­na Mieville
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• Amer­i­can Gods, Neil Gaiman 
• Rework, David Heine­meier Hans­son, Jason Fried
• The Road, Cor­mac McCarthy²
• The trans­mi­gra­tion of Tim­o­thy Archer, Philip K. Dick
• The Divine Inva­sion, Philip K. Dick
• Ver­mil­ion Sands, J. G. Bal­lard³
• The Broom Of The Sys­tem, David Fos­ter Wallace
• Number9Dream, David Mitchell
• Carter Beats the Dev­il, Glen David Gold
• Last Call, Tim Powers
• Thoughts on Inter­ac­tion Design, Jon Kolko
• The Catch­er in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
• The great Gats­by, Fran­cis Scott Fitzgerald
• Unit Oper­a­tions, Ian Bogost⁴
• I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Har­lan Ellison
• The Dis­pos­sessed, Ursu­la K. Le Guin
• Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard
• The Play­er of Games, Iain M. Banks
• Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick⁵
• The Ratio­nal Opti­mist: How Pros­per­i­ty Evolves, Matt Ridley

1. For its heart­warm­ing human­ism and great mar­riage of form and mes­sage. Most fun book about fun. [↩]
2. Beau­ti­ful, lyri­cal por­tray­al of the end of the world that hits you like a sledge­ham­mer. [↩]
3. Unpar­al­leled in the orig­i­nal­i­ty and believ­abil­i­ty of its envi­sioned future. No-one has a feel for near-future fash­ion and leisure like Bal­lard. [↩]
4. Tough but reward­ing read that pro­vides a sol­id frame­work for think­ing about the aes­thet­ics of all things pro­ce­dur­al. [↩]
5. Essen­tial PKD, deep med­i­ta­tion on what it means to be human wrapped in a sci­fi detec­tive plot. [↩]