Recommended books from 2017
Article Table of Contents
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.