Twenty books in 2016
(Originally published in 2016.)
I don’t generally do New Year’s resolutions, but this year, I set out to try and read 20 non-fiction books. While I do quite a lot of recreational reading, it’s generally in the form of Wikipedia articles or long-form articles from Longreads – reading book-books is relatively rare. Even when I do read actual books, I’ve generally leaned towards a relatively narrow set of topics (hint: mostly computer history).
So for this challenge, I aimed to widen my horizons a bit and try to read things on topics that I don’t know anything about. I solicited friends & co-workers for suggestions and built up a pretty good list. I didn’t love everything I read, but I liked nearly everything, and I loved a few. Here’s my list.
- January 1st — Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
- January 10th — Legends of Localization - Book 1: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin
- January 17th — 1995: The Year the Future Began by W. Joseph Campbell
- January 21st — The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
- January 26th — Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant
- February 1st — Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- February 7th — The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
- February 13th — Dude, You’re Gonna Be a Dad! by John Pfeiffer
- February 24th — The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury
- February 25th — Feminism Is For Everybody by Bell Hooks
- March 1st — Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc
- March 9th — Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World by Bill Nye
- March 23rd — Written in the Ruins by Paul Chiasson
- March 25th — Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
- April 13th — The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
- April 21st — Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff
- April 28th — Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George
- May 3rd — Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
- May 11th — Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen
- May 29th - Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit