The books I read in 2017, listed chronologically (January reads first). Some of these I commented on more fully in earlier posts and/or on Goodreads. You can see a prettier visualization of this data here.

1. Autumn by Ali Smith (my first Ali Smith and as I’ve said before, it was a true joy to read)
2. How To Be Both by Ali Smith (I preferred Autumn but also liked this)
3. Heartbreak by Andrea Dworkin (loved her voice)
4. The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri (disappointing – one star on Goodreads)
5. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee (really fantastic biography, though not as great at Lee’s bio of Virginia Woolf)
6. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (great)
7. Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law by Robert Post, K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas Grey, and Reva Siegel
8. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (if you want a super fun read about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, you must read this)
9. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (also excellent)
10. The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild (eye-opening and I’ve started giving it to all my girlfriends)
11. Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (enjoyed, especially after reading her biography first. In all her work there seem to be these moments of intense violence that are mixed in with the very normal everyday. In some sense it makes it even more jarring — you aren’t expecting it and she doesn’t do anything to help you process it afterwards. It’s just — here’s a horrible violent thing. And then we pan to the left and see Johnny having some tea.)
12. The Taming of Free Speech by Laura Weinrib (If you’re interested in the history of civil liberties, esp. the First Amendment, and how its current form is far away from its labor economic-rights-based origins, this is a must read. I thought it was so interesting. Go Laura!)
13. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
14. Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale by Debra Satz
15. N-W by Zadie Smith (got progressively better as it went along)
16. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World by Melvyn Dubofsky (As best I can tell this is *the* history of the Wobblies book to read – and for good reason)
17. To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization by William Alford (such an interesting topic but didn’t give me exactly as much as I’d hoped for. I wanted a deeper dive into the history and development of conceptions of property and ownership in China generally and then for IP specifically. Stealing as a concept already assumes a background ownership structure. It assumes that someone is a rightful possessor and then some other person wrongfully took that possession from them. But what’s interesting is how cultures can develop where what we might think of as stealing and wrong others simply don’t even conceptualize in that way. That is part of what I wanted to walk away with a better understanding of. But at only 236 pages, you can imagine that a lot had to be left out. If anybody reading this knows of another book like this but longer and deeper, please let me know!)
18. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (I loved this book. Like, loved it. Dear book gods, please please please give me a signed first edition. And if you want to send me the presentation copy from Woolf to Vita Sackville-West or even Vanessa Bell (see, I’m not picky!), I promise… well… I’ll promise whatever you’d like! (note the current price of the presentation copy to Vanessa Bell is currently listed on abebooks at $325,000!) (The cheapest signed first edition I see is already $2,887.50 on abebooks. I cry.)
19. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (given my love of The Hours (which you should read right now if you haven’t), I thought I’d have to love this one. But, alas, it just didn’t work much for me. I found Orlando and To The Lighthouse to be absolutely wonderful though.)
20. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand (great and now filled with pages of my notes)
21. The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
22. Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson (her Tanner Lectures followed with commentary from a number of people in different fields and then her replies to those replies.)
23. The Disappearing L by Bonnie J. Morris (about the rise and fall of US lesbian culture since the 70s, focusing almost exclusively on concert festivals (esp. Michigan Festival) and music more generally. As a Lilith Fair lover, I enjoyed reading about all the many awesome festivals that came before it. The demise of these kinds of events (think a women-only burning man in a summer camp) is a true loss.)
24. Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil by Deborah Nelson
25. Food Justice by Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi
26. Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller (easy intro to attachment theory, though I found their inability to sympathize with/contextualize avoidants a serious mark against it)
27. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
28. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus (sometimes, some of us, become a little, shall we say, unwell, when it comes to romantic relations. Most of the time we take this behavior to be bad/something to ‘work on’. Here’s a story of a woman who did the opposite. Put another way, there’s the person who calls their ex a bunch of times in a row and then finally feels ridiculous and creepy. Then there’s the person who just keeps calling, leaving hundreds of messages, sending letters, emails, etc. and 100% owns that. In fact, turns the whole thing into something of an art project. This is the person who drives their car, full-powered, over a cliff and while falling just screams manically “yes!!!!!” This book is about this latter sort of person. I found it sort of amazing.
29. The Myth of Ownership by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel
30. The Sum of Small Things by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (my previous review is here)
31. Future Sex by Emily Witt (a total disappointment)
32. Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy by Richard E. Ocejo (‘how educated and culturally savvy young people are transforming traditionally low-status manual labor jobs into elite taste-making occupations.’ People who gave this less than four stars on Goodreads were objectively wrong)
33. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (charming and delightful. I just loved this. If you, like me, love books about books and book culture and book collecting, you would absolutely treasure this one)
34. Feminism: A Very Short Introduction by Margaret Walters (3-stars ok)
35. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (I loved American Gods back in the day and was motivated to read this while watching the American Gods show. I love this world and would like to pay it more visits)
36. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff (the follow-up book to 84, Charing Cross Road. Also enjoyable but not nearly as much so as the original)
37. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch (Not hating men for about a week after reading this was a challenge)
38. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis (it’s not often that I explicitly think about form in literature. This book changed that. When trying to talk about, make senes, etc. of very painful times, the truth is we often don’t have one clear overarching narrative that runs in chronological order. Instead, we have fragments. Pieces from different moments run together. There can be a certain stillness and painful fog hanging over us. This book perfectly captures this through, in part, experimenting with form.)
39. Virginia Woolf by Hermoine Lee (without question the best biography I have ever read in my entire life. The only negative is that I don’t quite love Woolf-the-person so much anymore. But honestly, if you read Woolf, give yourself the gift of reading this book.)
40. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling and Jack Thorne (A goddamn tragedy. I was angry when I finished it. It was so bad, so unbelievable, so unfortunate. Oh, it hurts me still. I consider this outside the Canon and a flukey horrible mistake (that is making lots of people very rich). It’s so bad. Save yourself the heartbreak.)
41. Conversations on Art and Aesthetics by Hans Maes (A collection of interviews with some of the leading aesthetic philosophers around. For someone with no prior background in the topics, I found it a super helpful primer that sparked tons of ideas for future exploration
42. Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought by Samuel Scheffler
43. My Brilliant Best Friend by Elena Ferrrante
44. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
45. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
46. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (my reading these back-to-back over the course of *maybe* a week and a half speaks for itself. The relationship between the two main characters was so fascinating and rich and challenging. I kept thinking about these books for months.)
47. Beauty by Roger Scruton
48. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (worth reading multiple times and so much to say about it. The betrayal at the end (having to do, I think, will a desire to destroy what you feel controls you), our extremely limited access to Miss Brodie’s life outside the views of the girls — it was all just so psychologically interesting.)
49. Private Wongs by Arthur Ripstein
50. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi (translated by Jocelyne Allen) (an autobiographical manga. I just wanted to give her a big hug)
51. The Course of Love by Alain do Botton (long-term relationships are hard and the more books we have that talk about different ways to make them work, however they might work for those individuals,  the better)
52. Sourdough by Robin Sloan (I *loved* Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookshop and this was Sloan’s next book. Totally fun. Delightful. I felt like I was back in the bay area working at Google. Dear  Robin Sloan, I love you. Sincerely, me.)
53. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (rich, sad, and with a real sense of place)
54. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano (a step into more experimental-y writing styles.)
55. On Beauty by Elaine Scarry
56. How Fiction Works by James Wood (if you read fiction, you should read this book)
57. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art by Alexander Nehams (yes yes yes)
58. The Tyranny of the Ideal by Gerald Gaus (I saw him present at the NYU Law & Philosophy Colloquium this Fall and was absolutely fascinating with what his work on complex systems could mean in epistemology. That talk and this book inspired an entire paper of mine, and inspired me to take a course with Scott Page’s Modeling Complex Systems course on Coursera
59. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noe (Many little morsels of interesting thought but, alas, I felt like there was not enough depth. I wrote a review where I tried to help rationally reconstruct some of his arguments and provide some more nuanced accounts.)
60. The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee (recommended by a friend. It’s a two-part lecture Coetzee gave at Princeton for the Tanner Lecturers. But instead of a normal lecture, he delivered a fictional novella. I think this could pair nicely with Unspeakable Conversations by Harriet McBryde Johnson [NYT link here])
61. Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Plays by Mitchel Resnick (read to help with my epistemology paper. Quick and enjoyable)
62. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (better late than never. Read to help provide some context for my reading of Charles Mills’ White Ignorance and The Racial Contract)
63. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Enjoyed)
64. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith (I mean, the book is magical. The idea that octopi might be the most alien conscious creatures we ever encounter is striking. That nature could produce such different kinds of intelligent life, basically totally separate from each other is beautiful. It also provides me hope that there are aliens out there and they will find us!)

May 2018 bring more great books!