Books I’ve read in 2017

Return­ing to what is some­thing of an annu­al tra­di­tion, these are the books I’ve read in 2017. I set myself the goal of get­ting to 36 and man­aged 38 in the end. They’re list­ed below with some com­men­tary on par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable or oth­er­wise note­wor­thy reads. To make things a bit more user friend­ly I’ve gone with four broad buck­ets although as you’ll see with­in each the picks range across gen­res and subjects.

Fiction

I always have one piece of fic­tion or nar­ra­tive non-fic­tion going. I have a long-stand­ing ‘project’ of read­ing cult clas­sics. I can’t set­tle on a top pick for the first cat­e­go­ry so it’s going to have to be a tie between Lowry’s alco­hol-drenched tale of lost love in pre-WWII Mex­i­co, and Salter’s unmatched lyri­cal prose treat­ment of a young couple’s liaisons as imag­ined by a lech­er­ous recluse in post-WWII France.

When I feel like some­thing lighter I tend to seek out sci-fi writ­ten from before I was born. (Con­tem­po­rary sci-fi more often than not dis­ap­points me with its lack of imag­i­na­tion, or worse, nos­tal­gia for futures past. I’m look­ing at you, Cline.) My top pick here would be the Stru­gatsky broth­ers, who blew me away with their weird tale of a world for­ev­er changed by the inex­plic­a­ble vis­it by some­thing tru­ly alien.

I’ve also con­tin­ued to seek out works by women, although I’ve been less strict with myself in this depart­ment than pre­vi­ous years. Here I’m ashamed to admit it took me this long to final­ly read any­thing by Woolf because Mrs Dal­loway is every bit as good as they say it is. I rec­om­mend seek­ing out the anno­tat­ed Pen­guin addi­tion for addi­tion­al insights into the many things she references.

I’ve also some­times picked up a new­er book because it popped up on my radar and I was just real­ly excit­ed about read­ing it. Most notably Dolan’s retelling of the Ili­ad in all its glo­ri­ous, sad and gory detail, updat­ed for today’s sensibilities.

• War with the Newts, Karel Čapek
• The War Nerd Ili­ad, John Dolan
• Solaris, Stanisław Lem
• Road­side Pic­nic, Arkady Stru­gatsky and Boris Strugatsky
• Ready Play­er One, Ernest Cline
• Bring Up the Bod­ies (Thomas Cromwell, #2), Hilary Mantel
• Mrs Dal­loway, Vir­ginia Woolf
• A Sport and a Pas­time, James Salter
• The Days of Aban­don­ment, Ele­na Ferrante
• The Wasp Fac­to­ry, Iain Banks
• True Names and the Open­ing of the Cyber­space Fron­tier, Ver­nor Vinge
• Under the Vol­cano, Mal­colm Lowry
• Tenth of Decem­ber, George Saunders
• Kin­dred, Octavia E. Butler
• High-Rise, J.G. Ballard
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Mar­garet Atwood
• Speed­boat, Rena­ta Adler

Literary non-fiction

Each time I read a nar­ra­tive treat­ment of his­to­ry or cur­rent affairs I feel like I should be doing more of it. All of these are rec­om­mend­ed but Kapuś­cińs­ki tow­ers over all with his heart-wrench­ing first-per­son account of the Iran­ian revolution.

• De verover­ing van Bali, Ewald Vanvugt
• The Life and Mur­der of Anna Logi­no­va, Mark Ames
• Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapuściński
• Het real­i­ty-essay, Dirk Vis
• Indone­sia, Etc.: Explor­ing the Improb­a­ble Nation, Eliz­a­beth Pisani

Non-fiction

A few books on design and tech­nol­o­gy here, although most of my ‘pro­fes­sion­al’ read­ing was con­fined to aca­d­e­m­ic papers this year. I find those to be a more effec­tive way of get­ting a han­dle on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. Books pub­lished on my méti­er are noto­ri­ous­ly fluffy. I’ll point out Löw­gren for a tough but reward­ing read on how to do inter­ac­tion design in a non-dog­mat­ic but reflec­tive way.

I got into left­ist pol­i­tics quite heav­i­ly this year and tried to edu­cate myself a bit on con­tem­po­rary anti-cap­i­tal­ist think­ing. Fisher’s book is a most inter­est­ing and also amus­ing diag­no­sis of the cur­rent polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic world sys­tem through a cul­tur­al lens. It’s a shame he’s no longer with us, I won­der what he would have made of recent events.

• Thought­ful Inter­ac­tion Design: A Design Per­spec­tive on Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy, Jonas Löwgren
• Rebuild­ing the Left, Mar­ta Harnecker
• Cap­i­tal­ist Real­ism: Is there no alter­na­tive?, Mark Fisher
• The ABCs of Social­ism, Bhaskar Sunkara
• The Com­pan­ion Species Man­i­festo: Dogs, Peo­ple, and Sig­nif­i­cant Oth­er­ness, Don­na J.Haraway
• Against the Smart City, Adam Greenfield
• Super­in­tel­li­gence: Paths, Dan­gers, Strate­gies, Nick Bostrom
• The Lean Start­up: How Today’s Entre­pre­neurs Use Con­tin­u­ous Inno­va­tion to Cre­ate Rad­i­cal­ly Suc­cess­ful Busi­ness­es, Eric Ries
• Strate­gize: Prod­uct Strat­e­gy and Prod­uct Roadmap Prac­tices for the Dig­i­tal Age, Roman Pichler
• The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
• Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Design­ers, Poets & Philoso­phers, Leonard Koren

Game books

I decid­ed to work my way through a bunch of role­play­ing game books all ‘pow­ered by the apoc­a­lypse’ – a fam­i­ly of games which I have been aware of for quite a while but haven’t had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play myself. I like read­ing these because I find them odd­ly inspi­ra­tional for pro­fes­sion­al pur­pos­es. But I will point to the orig­i­nal Apoc­a­lypse World as the one must-read as Bak­er remains one of the design­ers I am absolute­ly in awe of for the ways in which he man­ages to com­bine sys­tem and fic­tion in tru­ly inven­tive ways.

• The Per­ilous Wilds, Jason Lutes
• Urban Shad­ows: Polit­i­cal Urban Fan­ta­sy Pow­ered by the Apoc­a­lypse, Andrew Medeiros
• Dun­geon World, Sage LaTorra
• Apoc­a­lypse World, D. Vin­cent Baker

Poetry

I don’t usu­al­ly read poet­ry for rea­sons sim­i­lar to how I basi­cal­ly stopped read­ing comics ear­li­er: I can’t seem to find a good way of dis­cov­er­ing worth­while things to read. The col­lec­tion below was a gift, and a delight­ful one.

• Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara

As always, I wel­come sug­ges­tions for what to read next. I’m shoot­ing for 36 again this year and plan to pro­ceed rough­ly as I’ve been doing lately—just mean­der from book to book with a bias towards works that are non-anglo, at least as old as I am, and prefer­ably weird or inventive. 

Pre­vi­ous years: 2016, 2015, 2011, 2009.