Returning to what is something of an annual tradition, these are the books I\u2019ve read in 2017. I set myself the goal of getting to 36 and managed 38 in the end. They\u2019re listed below with some commentary on particularly memorable or otherwise noteworthy reads. To make things a bit more user friendly I\u2019ve gone with four broad buckets although as you\u2019ll see within each the picks range across genres and subjects.<\/p>\n
I always have one piece of fiction or narrative non-fiction going. I have a long-standing \u2018project\u2019 of reading cult classics. I can\u2019t settle on a top pick for the first category so it\u2019s going to have to be a tie between Lowry\u2019s alcohol-drenched tale of lost love in pre-WWII Mexico, and Salter\u2019s unmatched lyrical prose treatment of a young couple\u2019s liaisons as imagined by a lecherous recluse in post-WWII France.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve also continued to seek out works by women, although I\u2019ve been less strict with myself in this department than previous years. Here I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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\u2019s retelling of the Iliad in all its glorious, sad and gory detail, updated for today\u2019s sensibilities.<\/p>\n
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 Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski towers over all with his heart-wrenching first-person account of the Iranian revolution.<\/p>\n
A few books on design and technology here, although most of my \u2018professional\u2019 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 m\u00e9tier are notoriously fluffy. I\u2019ll point out L\u00f6wgren for a tough but rewarding read on how to do interaction design in a non-dogmatic but reflective way.<\/p>\n
I got into leftist politics quite heavily this year and tried to educate myself a bit on contemporary anti-capitalist thinking. Fisher\u2019s book is a most interesting and also amusing diagnosis of the current political and economic world system through a cultural lens. It\u2019s a shame he\u2019s no longer with us, I wonder what he would have made of recent events.<\/p>\n
I decided to work my way through a bunch of roleplaying game books all \u2018powered by the apocalypse\u2019<\/a> \u2013 a family of games which I have been aware of for quite a while but haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t usually read poetry for reasons similar to how I basically stopped reading comics earlier: I can\u2019t seem to find a good way of discovering worthwhile things to read. The collection below was a gift, and a delightful one.<\/p>\n As always, I welcome suggestions for what to read next. I\u2019m shooting for 36 again this year and plan to proceed roughly as I\u2019ve been doing lately\u2014just 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. <\/p>\n Previous years: 2016<\/a>, 2015<\/a>, 2011<\/a>, 2009<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Returning to what is something of an annual tradition, these are the books I\u2019ve read in 2017. I set myself the goal of getting to 36 and managed 38 in the end. They\u2019re listed below with some commentary on particularly memorable or otherwise noteworthy reads. To make things a bit more user friendly I\u2019ve gone … Continue reading Books I\u2019ve read in 2017<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[625],"tags":[1191,104,70,105],"class_list":["post-3112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-1191","tag-books","tag-lists","tag-reading"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Poetry<\/h3>\n
\n