Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Books read in 2012


Books read in 2012:
  • Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
  • Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
  • Henry A. Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service
  • Robin Dreeke, It's Not All About "Me": The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone
  • David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment
  • Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
  • Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia
  • Grant Foster, Noise: Lies, Damned Lies, and Denial of Global Warming
  • Torkel Franzén, Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse
  • Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information
  • James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science
  • Sam Harris, Lying
  • Joseph Heath, Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism
  • Edward Humes: Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul
  • Ronald Kessler, The Secrets of the FBI
  • Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
  • Declan McHugh, Bloody London: A Shocking Guide to London's Gruesome Past and Present
  • Robert A. Melikian, Vanishing Phoenix
  • Mike McRae, Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs, and Bad Ideas
  • P.T. Mistlberger, The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley
  • Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
  • Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Historic Photos of Phoenix
  • Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
  • Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
  • Ali H. Soufan, with Daniel Freedman, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda
  • Neal Stephenson, REAMDE
  • Cole Stryker, Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
  • Tim Weiner: Enemies: A History of the FBI
  • Jon Winokur (compiler & editor), The Big Curmudgeon
  • Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
I made substantial progress on a few large books:
  • Ross Anderson, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (2nd ed)
  • Mark Dowd, John McDonald, and Justin Schuh, The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Avoiding Software Vulnerabilities
  • Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
  • James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
  • Michal Zalewski, The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications

(Previously: 2011201020092008200720062005.)

3 comments:

Misanthrope said...

Top 3?

Lippard said...

I'm not sure I can narrow it to three. Schneier, Weiner, Wu, Morozov, and Edmonds/Eidinow are probably the top five. Soufan, Olson, Greenberg, Hannam, and Heath probably round out the top ten. Atran would be higher if he had a better editor.

Hume's Ghost said...

I've got Monkey Girl on my Kindle but haven't gotten around to it yet ... I might have to move it up in the queue though. Want to read Enemies but haven't even started my copy of Legacy of Ashes.

I will second Edmonds/Eidinow. I'm partial to Rousseau's Dog for obvious reasons, but Wittgenstein's Poker is also excellent (and probably a better book, overall)