What I read in 2024
It was a good year to have a library card and a bad year for just about everything else
In an attempt to spend less time arguing online, I’ve been working through the backlog of books piling up — more precariously by the month — on surfaces around my apartment. I’ve made some progress … and also added to the piles by getting a second library membership. Overall, a good strategy.
There are surely patterns to be found in the list of what I read this year. Some of them are genuine indications of my interests at various moments and others are just the result of when library holds became available. (Another library quirk: English books read in French and French books read in English.)
- Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
- The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media
- Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
- Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus: Modern Photography Explained
- Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong
- One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America
- Le bœuf bourguignon
- I'm a Fan
- Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm
- There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
- Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
- Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
- The Vegan
- The Best American Food Writing 2019
- Mâle décolonisation: "l'homme arabe" et la France, de l'indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne (1962-1979)
- Known and Strange Things: Essays
- Red Plenty
- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
- Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
- Beirut
- Football et érotisme au masculin - Une anthropologue au stade
- Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War
- Cairo: Histories of a City
- We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958
- Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
- To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
- Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico
- Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
- The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids
- Art Nouveau
- Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
- Frostbite: How refrigeration changed our food, our planet
- The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
- L'Empire Moon
- When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
- Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
- The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism
- Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
- Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order,
- Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters
- Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
- The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope
- When McKinsey Comes to Town
- One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps
- The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
- Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
- Imperfect Justice: An East-West Diary
- The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA
- Torture and Democracy
- Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
- Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George"