Following on a suggestion from APS, for the past couple of years I’ve been keeping a note of all the books I finish. It’s been helpful to have a record, although occasionally difficult to resist turning it into a measure of productivity and consequently a source of anxiety. This year my fiction reading – mostly scifi – has been much less eclectic than my non-fiction reading which has, looking back, been kind of all over the place. The books I read this year that I enjoyed most, that stayed with me the longest, or that most shaped my thinking were, in roughly chronological order:
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy
Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (eds), Sisters of the Revolution
Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk
The Mud Flower Collective, God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television
Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle
Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality and the Transformation of Finitude
W G Sebald, Austerlitz
George Ciccariello-Maher, Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
Joan Sloncezwski, A Door Into Ocean
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
An und für sich 