Tuesday, January 01, 2019

Books read in 2018

Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2018.
  • Charles Arthur, Cyber Wars: Hacks that Shocked the Business World
  • Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South
  • Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
  • Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics
  • Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations
  • Rebecca Burns and David Dayen, Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story
  • John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
  • Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis, and Kurt Andersen, Spy: The Funny Years
  • Stephen Ellis, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime
  • Jason Fagone, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
  • Paul French, City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai
  • Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
  • Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
  • Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
  • David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
  • Richards J. Heuer Jr. and Randolph H. Pherson, Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis
  • Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump
  • Sarah Jeong, The Internet of Garbage
  • Steven Johnson, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most
  • Louise M. Kaiser and Randolph H. Pherson, Analytic Writing Guide
  • Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
  • Susan Landau, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age
  • Peter T. Leeson, WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird
  • Jeffrey Lewis, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States
  • Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk
  • Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
  • Nick Mason, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (new updated 2017 edition)
  • Tim Maurer, Cyber Mercenaries: The State, Hackers, and Power
  • Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton
  • Roger Naylor, The Amazing Kolb Brothers of Grand Canyon
  • Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
  • Ellen Pao, Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change
  • Dana Richards, editor, Dear Martin/Dear Marcello: Gardner and Truzzi on Skepticism
  • Louis Rossetto, Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet (1st edition, #1453, Kickstarter)
  • David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
  • Eli Saslow, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist
  • Harold Schechter, The Pirate (Amazon Prime Reading "Bloodlands Collection")
  • Harold Schechter, Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie (Amazon Prime Reading "Bloodlands Collection")
  • Harold Schechter, The Brick Slayer (Amazon Prime Reading "Bloodlands Collection")
  • Harold Schechter, Panic (Amazon Prime Reading "Bloodlands Collection")
  • Harold Schechter, Rampage (Amazon Prime Reading "Bloodlands Collection")
  • Harold Schechter, The Pied Piper (Amazon Prime Reading "Bloodlands Collection")
  • Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
  • Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
  • P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
  • Ali Soufan, Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State
  • Robert Timberg, The Nightingale's Song (bio of John McCain, James Webb, Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, and John Poindexter)
  • Mick West, Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
  • Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever
  • Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
  • Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House
  • Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
I made some progress on a few other books:
  • Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (will probably finish today)
  • Andrew Jaquith, Security Metrics: Replacing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
  • Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
Top for 2018:  Singer and Brooking, Bergman, Balko and Carrington, Gawande, Carreyrou, Sanger, Simler and Hanson, Soufan, Isikoff and Corn, Fagone, French, Schüll, Michael Lewis, Mason, Benkler et al., West, Wu, Saslow, Naylor. I didn't care for the Klosterman book at all--quick read, but a waste of time.

(Previously: 2017201620152014201320122011201020092008200720062005.)

2 comments:

Hume's Ghost said...

Wow. I only overlapped one book with you this year: SPQR, which I thought was very good.

I was on a Rome kick. Read that, Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar and Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero back-to-back-to-back.

Lippard said...

I did like Beard's book a lot, and considered putting it in my "top" list (which has more than 10, and I made no real attempt to order them). I've got Peter H. Wilson's The Holy Roman Empire ready to go for this year. The main themes for 2018 for me were cyberwarfare, cyber crime, strategic cyber threat intelligence analysis, and cyber policy. Most of the books on my list were either directly on those subjects, or were indirectly related.