2017 Books
| Title | Author | Date Finished | Rating | Publisher | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques 100 Recipes A Cook’s Manifesto | Michael Ruhlman, Donna Turner Ruhlman | 2017/12/30 | 4 | Chronicle Books, 2011 | Read My Notes |
| Rat Queens, Vol. 3: Demons | Kurtis J. Wiebe, Tess Fowler | 2017/12/25 | 4 | Image Comics, 2016 | |
| An Other Place | Darren Dash, Darren Shan | 2017/12/25 | 3 | Home Of The Damned, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital | Jason W. Moore | 2017/12/23 | 4 | Verso, 2015 | |
| How to Cook Without a Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know by Heart | Pam Anderson | 2017/12/23 | 4 | Broadway Books, 2000 | |
| Jughead, Vol. 1 | Chip Zdarsky, Erica Henderson | 2017/12/18 | 3 | Archie Comics, 2016 | |
| My Best Friend’s Exorcism | Grady Hendrix | 2017/12/18 | 4 | Quirk Books, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| How I Conquered Your Planet | John Swartzwelder | 2017/12/13 | 3 | Kennydale Books, 2006 | “A strange and funny science-fiction/noir mashup by a former Simpsons writer. I’ve now read two Swartzwelder novels (this and ““The Time Machine did it”") and I find that you almost have to read them out loud. There is a rhythm to the humor that doesn’t always come across when it’s just words on the page–no surprise for anyone who watched the Golden age of the Simpsons. This was a little more linear than ““Time Machine”” and by the end, I kind of ran out of steam reading it. Having said that, there are gut-bustingly funny sections of the book that are subtle, surreal, clever or all three. I probably won’t read it again, but I would almost definitely read another Swartzwelder novel. " |
| Class, Race, and Marxism | David Roediger | 2017/12/12 | 4 | Verso, 2017 | Read My Notes |
| Tacopedia: The Taco Encyclopedia | Deborah Holtz, Juan Carlos Mena | 2017/12/03 | 4 | Phaidon , 2015 | A stylish love-letter to one of Mexico’s most famous culinary exports. It’s part cookbook, part art-book, part travel guide. Presents the incredible diversity of tacos and taco culture across Mexico, with individual chapters on different styles and regional variations, along with a list of great stands and restaurants serving up each style. There are also some recipes, none of which look terribly difficult, but do occasionally require unusual ingredients. A fun and mouthwatering read! |
| Binti (Binti, #1) | Nnedi Okorafor | 2017/11/30 | 4 | Tor.com, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| The ABCs of Socialism | Bhaskar Sunkara, حسام حسینزاده, Phil Wrigglesworth | 2017/11/29 | 4 | Verso, 2016 | A readable, bite-sized introduction socialism, framed as common questions with rich and detailed answers, and written by the staff of the left-wing web-magazine Jacobin. I quibbled a bit with some of the responses (particularly around the relationship of class to race and gender) but the overall thrust of the book, namely that socialism is a humane and reasonable alternative to capitalist exploitation, is clear and concise. |
| Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl | Carrie Brownstein | 2017/11/21 | 4 | Riverhead Books, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| Babel-17 | Samuel R. Delany | 2017/11/19 | 4 | Gregg Press, 1978 | A strange and evocative novel about language, behavior, and the power of difference. I feel like I want to read it again, both because of the richness it presents, and also so that I know what I’m reading while I’m reading it. The one complaint that I had is that the exposition is very endloaded–there’s a lot of explanation and revelation right in the last few pages. It meant that I was mostly worried that I was in the dark, when in fact, I was just waiting for the punchline. |
| Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts: A defence of growth, progress, industry and stuff | Leigh Phillips | 2017/11/18 | 4 | Zero Books, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| Disappearance at Devil’s Rock | Paul Tremblay | 2017/11/06 | 5 | William Morrow, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| The Ballad of Black Tom | Victor LaValle | 2017/09/30 | 5 | Tor.com, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin | Corey Robin | 2017/09/24 | 4 | Oxford University Press, 2011 | More a collection of thematically related essays than a cohesive whole, but with some interesting insights into what has historically linked conservatism together despite wild differences of tone, philosophy, and rhetoric. The three key themes that conservatives generally share are:1.)An adherence to hierarchy as a natural organizing principle2.)The belief that such hierarchies must be created and maintained through constant struggle3.)A violent reaction against leftist calls for equality (undoing such hierarchies)4.)More abstractly, a belief in the importance of immediate empirical experience over rationalist planning. |
| Black Light | Elizabeth Hand | 2017/09/10 | 3 | HarperTorch, 2000 | Read My Notes |
| Providence Act 1 | Alan Moore, Jacen Burrows | 2017/09/02 | 4 | Panini Comics, 2015 | |
| The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis | Darryl Cunningham, Michael Patrick Goodwin | 2017/09/02 | 3 | Harry N. Abrams, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy | Martin Gilens | 2017/08/27 | 4 | University of Chicago Press, 2000 | Read My Notes |
| The Secret of Ventriloquism | Jon Padgett | 2017/07/31 | 4 | Dunhams Manor Press, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| Mapping the Interior | Stephen Graham Jones | 2017/07/21 | 5 | Tor.com, 2017 | Read My Notes |
| Starve, Vol. 1 | Brian Wood, Danijel Žeželj, Dave Stewart | 2017/07/15 | 3 | Image Comics, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| Gun Machine | Warren Ellis | 2017/07/13 | 4 | Mulholland Books, 2013 | Read My Notes |
| Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People | Thomas Frank | 2017/07/06 | 4 | Metropolitan Books, 2016 | |
| Assembling Enclosure: Transformations in the Rural Landscape of Post-Medieval North-East England | Ronan O’Donnell | 2017/07/06 | 0 | University Of Hertfordshire Press, 2016 | |
| The story of Alderley: Living with the Edge | A. J. N. W. Prag | 2017/07/02 | 0 | Manchester University Press, 2016 | |
| Wylding Hall | Elizabeth Hand | 2017/05/12 | 5 | Open Road Integrated, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| Best Served Cold | Joe Abercrombie | 2017/05/06 | 4 | Gollancz, 2009 | Read My Notes |
| Worked to the Bone: A History of Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky | Pem Davidson Buck | 2017/04/13 | 5 | Monthly Review Press, 2001 | Read My Note |
| The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) | Joe Haldeman | 2017/03/26 | 5 | Voyager, 2003 | Read My Notes |
| Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes | Tamim Ansary | 2017/03/16 | 4 | Blackstone Audio, 2009 | Read My Notes |
| Anya’s Ghost | Vera Brosgol | 2017/02/27 | 4 | First Second, 2011 | Read My Notes |
| The Supernatural Enhancements | Edgar Cantero | 2017/02/23 | 3 | Doubleday, 2014 | Read My Notes |
| Odd and the Frost Giants | Neil Gaiman, Mark Buckingham | 2017/02/18 | 5 | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008 | |
| Four Futures: Life After Capitalism | Peter Frase | 2017/02/13 | 4 | Verso, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia | Ursula K. Le Guin | 2017/02/09 | 5 | Harper Voyager, 1994 | Read My Notes |
| Victoria’s Madmen: Revolution and Alienation | Clive Bloom | 2017/01/29 | 4 | Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 | Read My Notes |
| On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction | William Zinsser | 2017/01/28 | 4 | Harper Perennial, 2006 | A love letter and travel guide to clear, declarative, and joyful writing. I feel like it’s a book I’ll dip into again and again, as I come to new writing projects. Zinsser importantly notes that writing is a process, and that the product (a final, completed piece of writing) is the result of multiple, diverging, and often competing practices–crafting a sentence and crafting a paragraph, writing and editing, declaration and rumination, and much more. Genre and subject guides toward the end were a little unnecessary for me, but the first half was really useful and thought-provoking. |
| Tomie | Junji Ito | 2017/01/11 | 2 | VIZ Media, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains | Neil Gaiman, Eddie Campbell | 2017/01/08 | 3 | William Morrow, 2014 | “A short and spooky quest story, about actions and consequences. The story is great. Neil Gaiman’s prose is florid and evocative as usual. But I still have trouble with Eddie Campbell’s art, which I find too abstract to really appreciate as illustration. I had the same trouble with ““From Hell””, though there, the abstraction added to the overall themes of history as a vague and uncertain pit filled with overlapping and competing narratives. Here it just feels slapdash. " |
| Scowler | Daniel Kraus | 2017/01/08 | 3 | Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2013 | Read My Notes |
| Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Sam Quinones | 2017/01/03 | 5 | Bloomsbury Press, 2015 | Read My Notes |
| Mutual Aid | Pyotr Kropotkin | 2017/01/03 | 4 | BiblioLife, 2008 | Read My Notes |
| Pretty Deadly, Vol. 2: The Bear | Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Ríos | 2017/12/28 | 5 | Image Comics, 2016 | Read My Notes |
| Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening | Marjorie M. Liu, Sana Takeda | 2017/11/26 | 5 | Image Comics, 2016 | Gorgeous and strange, and too complicated to summarize. I’m totally on board. |
| Saga, Volume 7 | Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples | 2017/11/23 | 5 | Image Comics, 2017 | Well, that was soul-crushing. |
| Bedbugs | Ben H. Winters | 2017/10/17 | 4 | Quirk Books, 2011 | Read My Notes |
Previous years' lists:
currently reading, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2000s, 1990s
