A bit late for end of the year posts, but then again, I’m several months behind on regular posts. 2017 was a pretty good year, reading-wise. There’s a lot of material here for future posts, which I’m sorry were nowhere near as frequent as I said they’d be. Turns out that, sort of like I predicted, writing book reports wasn’t all that fun.
But alas, with New Years comes New Years resolutions, and as you might have guessed writing more is mine. I figured a good way would be to quickly re-cap all the books I read in the last 12 months, and to quickly talk about some of what’s on the list for this year.
The full list is below, but I’m proud to report that I read 16 books cover to cover, averaging to a little over one per month. That doesn’t include seven others that I started but lost interest in, or any that I had to read for classes. A couple of biographies, a little history and current events, and just enough popular science to make me sound like I know what I’m talking about at parties. If I went to parties.
In 2018 my plan is to be a little more focused with the reading. I’m moving into the latter part of my masters program, and will need to start working on a thesis early in 2019, so the titles will likely be a little more related. What am I working on? Well, either media manipulation (fake news) or public awareness campaigns for sustainable technology. Or both if I could somehow manage it.
Anyway the list below will hopefully make up the majority of posts in the coming months. Assuming I don’t bail on this again, because, again, it’s writing book reports for fun.
And no, I’m not doing a re-cap of all the beers I drank in 2017. I read books, not write them.
Books I read in 2017:
Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers
The Grid by Gretchen Bakke
The Great Race by Levi Tilleman
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Mindwise by Nicholas Epley
Not a Scientist by Dave Levitan
Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Col. Chris Hadfield
Tubes by Andrew Blum
Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett
Social Physics by Alex Pentland
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner
Books, Beer, and the Future 