Recommended books from 2017

Article Table of Contents

• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December

I read many books in 2017. I’m listing them out here, along with recommendations. Here’s the recommendation “key”:

• 👍 = I recommend this book. This is intentionally fuzzy.
• 😔 = This book influenced my mental model of the world/reality/myself
• 🏢 = Book topic is architecture and/or urbanism
• 💵 = Book topic is finance/economics/politics
• 😫 = This book is hard to get through. Lengthy and/or academic (or both)
• 🐲 = Fiction (most of the fiction I read had fantastic(al) creatures in them, hence the dragon)

January #

• Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection 👍 🐲
• Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design 🏢
• Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent 💵
• Heal Us, Emmanuel: A Call for Racial Reconciliation, Representation, and Unity in the Church
• Espresso Lessons
• Makers 🐲
• A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) 😔 👍
• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead 👍 😔
• Ghost in the Shell (Ghost in the Shell, #1) 🐲

February #

• Eloquent Ruby
• Steve Jobs 👍
• The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith 😔
• Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City 😔 💵

March #

• The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey 😔 👍 💵
• Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
• Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

April #

• The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
• Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise 👍
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
• The Graveyard Book 👍 🐲

May #

• For the Win 🐲
• Agile Web Development with Rails 5
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects 🐲
• Arrival 👍 🐲
• The San Francisco Fallacy: The Ten Fallacies That Make Founders Fail
• Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition 😔 👍 😫
• American Gods 🐲

June #

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
• Unwritten Laws Of Engineering 👍 😔
• Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design 💵 🏢
• Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles 💵 😫
• Your Move: The Underdog’s Guide to Building Your Business

July #

• Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—and How We Can Fix It 😔 👍
• Anansi Boys 🐲
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion 😔 👍
• Cherish: The One Word That Changes Everything for Your Marriage
• Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3) 👍 🐲 😫

August #

• Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence 👍 😫
• How to Learn & Memorize Poetry
• The Fountainhead 😫 🐲
• Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions 😔
• Practical Anarchy 💵
• Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined 💵
• The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) 🐲
• The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2) 🐲
• The Privatization of Roads and Highways 💵 😔
• When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy 😔 👍

September #

• Seveneves 😫 🐲
• The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia 😔 😫
• Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1) 🐲
• Eating Animals 😔 👍

October #

• The Run of His Life: The People versus O.J. Simpson 👍
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 👍 😔 💵
• The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect 🐲
• Fool Moon (The Dresden Files, #2) 🐲
• Common Sense 💵
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter, #1) 🐲
• The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age 👍 😔 💵
• Anatomy of the State 💵
• Alexander Hamilton 👍 😔 😫

November #

• Two Cheers for Anarchism 😔
• Drone: Remote Control Warfare
• Summer Knight (The Dresden Files, #4) 🐲
• Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation 💵 🏢
• The Case Against the Fed 💵
• City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City 👍 🏢
• Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
• Outpatients

December #

• Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3) 👍 😫 🐲
• Charlie Wilson’s War 👍 💵
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals 👍 😔
• Death Masks (The Dresden Files, #5) 🐲
• What Has Government Done to Our Money? 💵
• Blood Rites (The Dresden Files, #6) 🐲
• The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5 💵
• 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You 😔 👍

That’s it. It was a good year of reading.