My 2023 Reading List

2023 was, iirc, the second year I’ve set the goal of reading a book a week — and this year I managed to do it again! It was not easy to squeeze in time to read whole books while also doing research and teaching. Well, actually, I suppose it was: I’m lucky to have a job where I am paid to read. But it was still a lot of work, is what I am saying. Luckily I also had many long airplane, bus and train rides.

I love reading whole books. Not listening to them: Reading them. I appreciate audiobooks, but I also think they have serious limitations and I can’t stand not being able to underline, slowdown, or reread passages. One downside is that I have no idea what films or TV shows have existed in 2023. One upside is that in order to make my goal I was forced to read things I normally wouldn’t. But then one downside was that having to read things I normally wouldn’t meant having to read a novel instead of taking two (or four) weeks to read all of Deep South. So: life involves tradeoffs.

I track my reading on Storygraph, which is not owned by a huge corporation (yet). You can find my profile here and friend me if you like.

A few highlights: I had an Encounter with Paul Friedrich. Don’t read Princes of Naranja without reading Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village first. Trust me. Don’t do it. I was shocked to find how much I loved Blindsight by Peter Watts. I think it must be one of my favorite sci-fi novels now. One of my other favorite books this year was Sevens Heaven, an inspiring oral history of the rise of the Fiji Rugby Sevens team. It’s much more than just an oral history. Very Inspiring — I can’t recommend it enough, you will read it in an afternoon. Best of all, you can read the stories of the all-important games, and the watch them on YouTube. I also read The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson, who I vaguely knew was famous. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. My least favorite book was Songlines, which is a famous piece of travel writing I just couldn’t stand at all. The most important book I read was The Fight For Privacy by Danielle Citron, which makes a strong (and very easy to read) case for privacy on the Internet.

But enough of that… here’s the list!

• Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village by Paul Friedrich
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• Brandy: A Global History by Becky Sue Epstein
• Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990 – 1992 by Charles Tilly
• Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends by Linda Kinstler
• The Confident Mind by Dr. Nate Zinsser
• The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology by Greg Dening
• A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao
• Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life by Vivian Gornick
• The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson
• Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation by Dean Jobb
• A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat by PAUL. CAMPOS
• The Female Man by Joanna Russ
• The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age by Danielle Keats Citron
• Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov by Moshe Rosman
• Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
• Gangsters & Organized Crime in Jewish Chicago by Alex Garel-Frantzen
• Hawai’i’s Kōlea: The Amazing Transpacific Life of the Pacific Golden-Plover by Susan Scott, Oscar W. Johnson
• In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin
• Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences by Isaac Ariail Reed
• The Invention of Tradition by Prys Morgan, Bernard S. Cohn, Hugh Trevor-Roper, David Cannadine, Terence O. Ranger, Eric Hobsbawm
• Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution by Shlomo Avineri
• Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society by A.M. Hocart
• Language in Culture: Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language by Michael Silverstein
• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure by Götz Aly
• A Maverick Boasian: The Life and Work of Alexander A. Goldenweiser by Sergei Kan
• Mr Tulsi’s Store: A Fijian Journey by Brij V. Lal
• The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions by Adam Kuper
• My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner: The first full English translation of the classic Yiddish story by Chaim Grade
• October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville
• On Fiji Islands by Ronald Wright
• Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other: Self and Society in Fiji by Karen J. Brison
• Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain by Freddy Foks
• A Passion for History: Conversations with Denis Crouzet by Michael Wolfe, Natalie Zemon Davis
• Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia by Karen Ordahl Kupperman
• Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America by Stephen G. Bloom
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method by Paul Friedrich
• Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes, the Kings, and Garibaldi’s Rebels in the Struggle to Rule Modern Italy by David I. Kertzer
• Reamde by Neal Stephenson
• Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago by Ann Durkin Keating
• The Science of Culture, a Study of Man and Civilization by Leslie A. White
• Search for a Method by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sevens Heaven: The Beautiful Chaos of Fiji’s Olympic Dream by Ben Ryan
• The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
• The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph L. Reed Jr.
• The Tangleroot Palace: Stories by Marjorie Liu
• Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism by Toure Reed
• True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman
• Ventus by Karl Schroeder
• World of Warcraft by Daniel Lisi