What I read in 2024

InIn 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 by Peter Robison
• The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media by Nathan Jurgenson
• Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by Alexandre Montagu and David Bellos
• Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus: Modern Photography Explained by Jackie Higgins
• Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong by Christopher DeWolf
• One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten
• Le bœuf bourguignon by Matthieu Aussudre
• I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel
• Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas
• There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura
• Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll
• Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis
• The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein
• The Best American Food Writing 2019
• Mâle décolonisation: "l'homme arabe" et la France, de l'indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne (1962-1979) by Todd Shepard
• Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
• Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
• Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein
• Beirut by Samir Kassir
• Football et érotisme au masculin - Une anthropologue au stade by Beatriz Vélez
• Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk
• Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar Al Sayyad
• We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 by Fintan O'Toole
• Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain
• To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton
• Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro
• Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern
• The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids by Alexandra Lange
• Art Nouveau by Stephen Escritt
• Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm
• Frostbite: How refrigeration changed our food, our planet by Nicola Twilley
• The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg
• L'Empire Moon by Jean-François Boyer
• When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
• The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism by Mike Davis
• Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer
• Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, by Saleha Mohsin
• Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters by Serhii Plokhy
• Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy
• The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope by Daniel Greene
• When McKinsey Comes to Town by Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich
• One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pitzer
• The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
• Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin
• Imperfect Justice: An East-West Diary by Inga Markovits
• The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughan
• Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali
• Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
• Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George" by James Lapine