Books Read in 2009

Once again, here's my annual list of books I've read in the last year. I did much better in quantity than last year--going back to school helped a bit, even though the vast majority of reading for class was articles that aren't reflected in this list.

• John Baer, James C. Kaufman, and Roy F. Baumeister, editors, Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will
• Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists
• Jeff Benedict, Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage
• Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide
• Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
  
• Fred P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition
  
• Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes (not very funny, and thinks "all platypuses are mammals" is analytic and a priori, p. 67--is that what they teach at Harvard?)
  
• Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
• Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
• Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop
• Jean-Roch Laurence and Campbell Perry, Hypnosis, Will, and Memory: A Psycho-Legal History
• Penn Jillette, How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard
• Paul Krassner, In Praise of Indecency: The Leading Investigative Satirist Sounds Off on Hypocrisy, Censorship, and Free Expression
• Paul Krassner, Who's to Say What's Obscene? Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today
• Oscar Levant, The Unimportance of Being Oscar
• Oscar Levant, A Smattering of Ignorance
• Ben Mezrich, Busting Vegas: A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds
• Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
• Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
• Vincent Price, I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography
  
• W.V. Quine, Methods of Logic, Fourth Edition
  
• Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy
  
• Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
• John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality
• Kyrsten Sinema, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last
• Jim Steinmeyer, Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
  
• Gore Vidal, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia
• T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I also read significant parts of

• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
  
• Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy
• Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, editors, The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Third Edition
  
• Michael Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity
  
• Elliott Mendelson, Introduction to Mathematical Logic (5th edition) (worked through ch. 3 on number theory and Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the appendix on second-order predicate logic, along with Boolos & Jeffrey's Computability and Logic chapter on second-order predicate logic)
  
• R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge, editors, Companion to the History of Modern Science
• Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life

(Previously: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)