Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Books read in 2013

Not much blogging going on here lately, but here's my annual list of books read for 2013:
  • Ross Anderson, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (2nd ed)
  • Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death
  • Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot
  • J.C. Carleson, Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer
  • Ronald J. Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
  • Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
  • Cory Doctorow, Homeland
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (re-read, thanks to free Kindle edition)
  • Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir
  • John Forester, Novelist & Storyteller: The Life of C.S. Forester, vol. 1 & vol. 2
  • Martin Gardner, Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner
  • Adam Gorightly, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture
  • Jason Healey, editor, A Fierce Domain: Conflict in Cyberspace, 1986 to 2012
  • Jenna Miscavige Hill: Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
  • Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
  • Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, The Unincorporated Man
  • Jon Krakauer, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way
  • Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
  • Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero, Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids
  • David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Men
  • Philip Metcalfe, Whispering Wires: The Tragic Tale of an American Bootlegger
  • Torin Monahan, editor, Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life
  • Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit
  • Adam Penenberg, Virtually True
  • Lewis Pinault, Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Corporate Consulting
  • Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
  • Ann Rowe Seaman, America's Most Hated Woman: The Life and Gruesome Death of Madalyn Murray O'Hair
  • Karl Sabbagh, Shooting Star: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Frank Ramsey
  • Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
  • Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies
  • Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media, The First 2,000 Years
  • Will Storr, Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
  • John Sweeney, The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology
  • Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory
  • Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief
I made progress on a few other books (first three still not finished from last year):
  • Mark Dowd, John McDonald, and Justin Schuh, The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Avoiding Software Vulnerabilities
  • 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
  • Richard Bejtlich, The Practice of Network Security Monitoring
  • Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers
  • James Grimmelmann, Internet Law: Cases & Problems (v2; v3 is out now)
  • Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
Top ten for 2013:  Ebert, Kahneman, Wright, Anderson, Pinker, Seaman, Walker, Sacks, Deibert, Dennett.  Runners Up: Blum, Kim, Miscavige Hill.

(Previously: 2012, 2011201020092008200720062005.)

1 comment:

  1. The only books on your list I have read is The Church of Fear and the complete Sherlock Holmes - and I'm only half done with that collection.

    There are several books on this list that I intend to read, however. Particularly Better Angels; Going Clear; and Thinking, Fast and Slow.

    I read mostly fiction this year, my honorable mentions being Mather's Atopia Chronicles, Howey's Shift Omnibus and Dust, Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Stephen King's 11/22/63.

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