what i read in 2024

[alyaza]

Alyaza Birze (January 2)

in today's edition of birzeblog i'd like to recap all of the books i read in 2024—i did not really do this on Cohost and i have been quite inconsistent in my blogging so far, so you all have missed a lot. in total i read 60 books. that was well over my goal of 40, so in 2025, i'll be upping my reading goal to 50. that's about one book a week—i think i can manage pretty well, assuming nothing bad happens. anyways, let's not waste too much time. this is a long post even confined to my brief blurbs on each book.

January

1. Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest (Sandi Doughton): an interesting look into the inevitable, next Pacific Northwest earthquake; there's quite a lot going on geologically in the Seattle metropolitan area and personally i found this book to be a pretty good introduction to it all. probably a worthwhile book if you're a paranoid Seattleite.
2. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Henry Grabar): the first of several urbanist and urban planning books that will make this list—and one i actually have to reread in 2025 because i forgot to mark it up on my first reading. this is an excellent book as an introduction to how badly we've fucked up American cities with parking, and what can be done to fix that. i would consider this one of the canonical must-reads for urban reformists.
3. Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (M. Nolan Gray): the second of the urbanist books (and another i need to mark up), Arbitrary Lines is to zoning what Paved Paradise is to parking. i don't think you'll agree with literally everything M. Nolan Gray suggests here—he is against zoning entirely, and i do think there are at least some cases where a system of zoning is warranted—but after reading this i do think you will concur that substantial zoning reform is necessary as a baseline. one fun fact i learned from this book: zoning as we know it in America is only about 100 years old, and it was initially a controversial practice that was constitutionally challenged (obviously, it was held as constitutional) and required government incentivization to become widespread.
4. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Jason Hickel): an interesting, introductory book to degrowth. i am not a degrowther—and found most of this book's argumentation unconvincing and at times revisionist of history—but many of the basic ideas of degrowth are not particularly objectionable and i would like to see those become commonplace in society. as we'll get into further down the list, i think Cuba provides a model for a lot of what degrowthers have in mind.
5. Aurora (David Koepp): the first fiction entry on this list, Aurora is a delightful post-apocalyptic book that contrasts two siblings—a wealthy prepper and an ordinary sister—and how their lives change when an extremely powerful geomagnetic storm destroys the power grid. i don't want to give very much away here because so much of the book rides on character development, but i found it enthralling enough to read it in just one day.
6. The Great Transition (Nick Fuller Googins): a frankly beautiful fiction book with a beautiful, interesting, climate-change informed setting. it's admittedly a small category but in terms of climate-influenced speculative fiction i consider this one of the best books of the category. consider this a wholehearted endorsement.
7. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien): i talked about this one on Cohost extensively as moderately disappointing because of my frame of reference. from my post on the matter:

   if you have a world where 40% of people are now non-cis and body modification is so normalized that it can be done without actual surgery, it just strikes me as almost conservative that people would still find it remarkable to be trans—certainly enough so for it to be a social category worth distinguishing from being cis in the vast majority of cases. that's how this tends to go in furry spaces, where basically everyone is already non-cis and often times extremely transgender. ditto with queer identities and to a lesser extent sexuality. perhaps we would go full abolitionist with these descriptors if given a chance to start over in a revolution of this sort. or perhaps the inverse of what i describe is true: a kaleidoscope of new identities would form, and be given legitimized social meaning in a world where the gender binary has been completely broken. either seems more plausible, and more interesting. i would also consider it rather conservative that, in such an advanced society (where augmentation of reality is possible through body modification and AI is considered sentient) there would be no serious grappling with transhumanism or the possibility of identifying as non-human at all—or how that might relate to gender expression and society as a whole. i don't even mean therianthropy here necessarily, although if we're being serious therians would probably be the vanguard of questioning humanity and its imposition.

February

1. Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (Janette Sadik-Khan): a very insightful book by New York City's former transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who you—from pedestrianizing Times Square to the massive expansion of bike lanes in the city—could say kickstarted NYC's ongoing revolution in transportation infrastructure. this book goes over not only the benefits of all of this new infrastructure and the deprioritization of cars generally, but also how that was won and what it took to build the support for it. a welcome addition to any bookshelf, in my view.
2. Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion (Arnold August): if you don't mind a fairly uncritical treatment of Cuba, Cuba and Its Neighbors is one of the most insightful books on the system of government there. this book gave me a newfound appreciation for their system of government in specific and the extent to which i believe it can be credibly called democratic. for maximal effect i of course would recommend supplementing this book with People's Power by Peter Roman, which will appear downlist.
3. Extreme Cities: Climate Chaos and the Urban Future (Ashley Dawson): i don't actually have all that much to say about this book, which i found fine (if inevitably dating because it is now an eight year old book on climate change); i think i mostly just don't like Ashley Dawson's political prescriptions, which at times in this book come off as underinformed and bordering on NIMBY.
4. Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (John P. Clark and Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater): although the systems described herein were abolished by the Zapatistas in 2023 and have subsequently been reorganized and decentralized further, this book remains an invaluable asset to anyone seeking to understand the Zapatista governance and decisionmaking process, and the revolutionary culture of EZLN-held Chiapas. genuinely one of the most insightful and inspiring books i've ever read, with ideas and models that i hope can one day will be emulated everywhere and not merely in a few pockets of the world. if you are an anarchist: read this book.
5. People's Power: Cuba's Experience with Representative Government (Peter Roman): this book is a more balanced and critical examination of the Cuban system than Arnold August's, and it also fills in details and influences on the Cuban system that August's book does not. if you have to choose between the two, i'd recommend this one. but i think both are useful books to learn from in their own ways, and as i said i would encourage you to read both and synthesize your own conclusions from them.
6. The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Lionel Shriver): easily the most wonkish fiction book i've ever read, i am definitely in the audience of ten or so for this one. steer clear of this one if you have no interest in a narrative which basically teaches you fiscal policy along the way—and it must sound very weird for me to say that if you have never heard of this book—but i found it a very unique book and quite enjoyable on that basis. it feels like a book that exists because someone was willing to entertain someone's passion project, and literature desperately needs more of that.

March

1. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin): i don't know that you need me to sell you on this one. it's Ursula K. Le Guin, this is one of her classics, if you only read a few books from her this should be one of them. it's arguably better than The Dispossessed.
2. The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis (Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros): truthfully, i don't remember all that much from this one—possibly because i didn't mark it up, possibly because i didn't mesh with its particular style. but if you find this blurb interesting, pick this one up at your next opportunity:

   Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, detailing what will be lost if we do not take bold action now. Weaving together contemporary stories and speculative “future histories” for each place, this work considers both the serious consequences if we continue to pursue business as usual, and what we can do—from government policies to grassroots activism—to write a different, more hopeful story.

3. Social Ecology and Communalism (Murray Bookchin): a very influential text for me, and a good and digestible introduction to the extensive thought of Murray Bookchin. also highly recommend as an introductory text to the anarchist-oriented side of left-wing politics, since much of Bookchin's theory was influenced by anarchist thought. (fun aside: optimistically this year i'll be going through all of Bookchin's major works, since i haven't done that yet.)
4. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer): a must read for anyone, but especially for the leftist-minded. politically, i think your praxis is incomplete if it cannot accomodate this book. (incidentally: i have observed both on Cohost and in my notes that this book synthesizes well with social ecology and Bookchin's writings generally; one day i hope to make a full-fledged essay out of those notes.)
5. Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Chaia Heller): this theoretical text from Chaia Heller is joined at the hip to social ecology; Heller is a student of Bookchin and takes after him extensively. however, you don't need to be a social ecologist to find this a very interesting book, and i think this is a solid one for challenging and refining how you feel about the natural world. just one observation from Heller, for example, worth your time:

   More and more, the ‘nature’ we know is a romantic presentation of an exaggerated ‘hypernature’ marketing researchers believe we would be likely to buy. The less we know about rural life, for instance, the more we desire it. Ideas of ‘nature’, a blend of notions of exotic ‘wilderness’ and ‘country living’, form a repository for dreams of a desirable quality of life. So many of us long wistfully for a life we have never lived but hope to find someday on vacation at a Disneyfied ‘jungle safari’ or glittering sweetly inside a bottle of Vermont Made maple syrup.

April

1. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (Janet Biehl): the definitive account of Murray Bookchin's life, and how his ideology changed throughout the years. accept no substitutes—Biehl was a close friend and confidante, and so knows her stuff.
2. Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias (Kevin Cook): truthfully, i could not tell you the difference between this one and...
3. Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage (Jeff Guinn): ...this one. i am partial to Guinn's book over Cook's, but both are worthwhile volumes about the Branch Davidians and the fateful Waco siege for which they are so infamously known. this is also a good set of books for contextualizing the backlash and aftermath to Waco, which in many respects are the immediate cause of the American militia movement and fodder for anti-government objection generally. Alex Jones in particular got his "start" being a Waco conspiracist, and for a long time that was his bread and butter.
4. I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (A.M. Gittlitz): a frankly delightful book on the obscure but often-memed Posadist ideology, an extremely unorthodox variant of Trotskyism named for its leading figure J. Posadas. Posadas, it turns out, was a very interesting guy who was rather influential (and bounced around a lot) in Argentine Trotskyism—and for most of his life, he was not particularly eclectic. most of the political positions for which he has become notorious came late in life, and during periods of infighting in his niche of Trotskyism. his children are also fascinating—one of them loves Donald Trump, apparently.
5. When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich): if you have ever wanted to learn about the dark world of consulting and the unimaginable power it—and McKinsey in particular—has over the world then this is the book for you. the sheer amount of wrong McKinsey has been a part of is unbelievable. we should annihilate this company and all companies like it.
6. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (David Neiwert): an important book in peeling back all of the connections of the modern American far-right; there are so many figures who play off of and influence each other, and this book does an admirable job of weaving them into any sort of coherent narrative.

May

1. The Making of the President, 1960 (Theodore H. White): the first of a classic series of political books; i have yet to read the other ones, but hopefully that will occur this year.
2. A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings (William H. Reid): there's not much to say about this one. it's a niche topic but seems to be the definitive book if you're interested in an account of the Aurora mass shooting back in 2012.
3. Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (John Staples Shockley): this book is a bit dated (having released in 1974), but it is the first comprehensive account of the development of La Raza Unida Party, and its control of Crystal City through 1974. if you're a third-party advocate looking for history, this is a fascinating book if you can get your hands on it. it is of course best supplemented by subsequent work, some of which i have read and will appear in the next month on this list.
4. Crossroads: My Story of Tragedy and Resilience as a Humboldt Bronco (Kaleb Dahlgren): not much to say about this one. for the other non-Canadians: see also the Humboldt Broncos bus crash Wikipedia page

June

1. Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (Armando Navarro): this book builds on Shockley's Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town and is what i'd consider the definitive account of the La Raza Unida period of Crystal City. meticulous in its detail and an invaluable read for any person interested in this fascinating piece of Chicano history.
2. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (David P. Chandler): a thorough examination of the infamous S-21 prison of Democratic Kampuchea; lots of details from this one that stand out, such as the extreme gender imbalance in prisoners (very few women were murdered in S-21) and the disparity in treatment of prisoners (although nearly all prisoners were executed, high-ranking prisoners were treated notably better so they could be coerced into lengthy confessions). also interesting how much supporting staff was necessitated for a prison that "only" held 1,500 prisoners at any given time and processed around 15,000 people across several years. Chandler figures something like 300 in total.
3. Island on Fire: The extraordinary story of Laki, the volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark (Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe): not worth your time, really.
4. Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Jeffrey H. Jackson): this is as much an interesting study of the society and politics of Paris in 1910 as it is a study of its most calamitous flood; if you signed up for a narrative about the Seine, this book will also give you a crash course in the class dynamics and and social order of the period. i think that's neat, and somewhat enlightening. YMMV.

July

1. The Workingmen's Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Philip Sheldon Foner): if you've ever wondered what the first Marxist party in the United States was like and its history, Foner has you covered here. it was surprisingly successful given its status as a sort of Frankenstein-party between two competing and effectively mutually exclusive ideologies (Marxism and Lassalleanism), and quite a few significant figures in left-wing history were involved in the party. also, fun fact: because it ultimately reformed itself into the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), if you count the SLP as still existing we're at most one generation removed from WPUS right now.

August

1. Commune Or Nothing!: Venezuela's Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (Chris Gilbert): Venezuela's communal project is another fascinating ongoing left-wing experiment, and Chris Gilbert does an excellent job in this book sketching out its nuances, its difficulties, its relation to the state, and the inevitable communal conflicts with the state. even if you are oppositional to the Venezuelan state, i think the communal project is a beacon of light and worth learning about as a potential model.
2. Killed by a Traffic Engineer (Wes Marshall): a shocking amount of traffic engineering is pseudoscientific, and this book systematically dismantles that pseudoscience in straightforward and easy to read detail. thank to its many short, to-the-point chapters, this is also a very easy book to pick up and put down. i highly recommend it as both an indispensable resource for many of the problems with trafic engineering (and how to make things better), and as catharsis that things are actually wrong.
3. Black Disability Politics (Sami Schalk): just a broadly excellent book for any disability advocate or person interested in intersectionality; also an incredible source of information on the Black Panther Party and its work in this space, which i was unaware of before this point.
4. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (Helmut Gruber): Vienna and its housing is often upheld in socialist spaces as an example of what is possible with a committed socialist movement even in a hostile capitalist country, and this book goes to great lengths and detail in describing the unique circumstances that made Red Vienna possible. it doesn't hold back on criticism and shortcomings of the Viennese experiment either, and in this respect i think it's quite a valuable book on this historical period and what might be possible today. it also goes into the extensive efforts of the Austrian SDAP to create a working-class culture out of Vienna's proletarians, to mixed but truly interesting results. one additional fun fact from this book: the SDAP experimented with state-built single-family housing but found it far too expensive to build at scale relative to apartments—thus, the communal social housing that so characterizes Vienna became the norm:

   Between 1919 and 1934 the municipality built 63,924 new domiciles in Vienna, 58,667 of which were in apartment dwellings and 5,257 in one-family houses. In practical terms this meant that every tenth dwelling was a new creation of the public authorities and that almost 200,000 Viennese were fortunate enough to reside in them. [...] After 1924 the municipality took over the building of one-family housing communities, but soon abandoned such efforts on the grounds that they were too costly in comparison to superblock apartment buildings.

5. Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures (Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro): an absolutely fascinating book on how past and present socialist states have related to the environment. this book introduced me to Cuba and its frankly awe-inspiring efforts to protect the environment, and its revolutionary efforts to create a sustainable agricultural system in the absence of large amounts of oil and chemical fertilizers (due to the ongoing blockade). while Cuba continues to have many problems—and it can be argued that its environmental successes are largely in spite of its desires, not because of them—i think Cuba is a model for a better future. particularly if you're a degrowther, you should look to Cuba and what it's doing and learn from it.
6. Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (Grist): it's a good anthology, you should read it and make a day for it. the last piece is truly excellent.
7. The Displacements (Bruce Holsinger): i found this novel to be pretty entertaining; it is exceedingly politically unsubtle, however, and your mileage might vary on that one.

September

1. Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement (Jeff Ordower): if you're a labor organizer or a climate organizer, or both, this seems like a pretty good book to have on your shelf. i learned some nifty stuff from this one, like the origin of the term just transition (coined by Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) leader Tony Mazzocchi); there are also some really cool under-the-radar initiatives this book profiles, like Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farmworkers’ union based in Washington.
2. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (John Vaillant): a gripping account of the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 intermixed with broader story threads about the nature of Canada as a country, Fort McMurray as a symptom of settler-colonial society, climate change as a phenomenon, and the oil industry that created Fort McMurray and its complicity in these aforementioned threads. somehow this book is both sweeping and narrow in scope, and manages to be good at both—it is probably a top five book of the 60 i read, and i would consider it obligatory reading especially if you are Canadian.
3. Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (Tad Delay): this is a frankly devastating entry into this list on all counts, and is not for those inclined to doom about things. but i find it an important reality check and a good addition to the canon of climate-related books. Delay covers a wide range of subjects here with care, and makes a number of interesting points i did not consider before reading this book. you might find this to be one, for example—is it actually a market failure to end the world?:

   Accessible fossil fuel reserves are worth a couple of hundred trillion dollars. Total fossil fuel resources are worth $2.4 quadrillion. Incentives point in the wrong direction. Climate change isn’t a “market failure.” It’s a market success. [...] We will probably burn through most of our fossil fuel reserves. Capitalism will incentivize renewables inasmuch as they are profitable, not because the legal and political superstructure meets its unserious goals to stop the progress of this storm. In the meantime, the vulnerable suffer. Who has agency to switch algorithms? By the end of this book, you will need to decide whether even the revolutionary’s desire for agency is denial.

October

1. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Kevin Flynn, Jim Dwyer): there is not much to be said about this one—i will observe for the record however that Rudy Giuliani is a fucking moron, and it is unbelievable how badly New York City's agencies work(ed) with each other.
2. Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (Brandon Keim): probably the most interesting and heartening book i read this year. this book will give you a lot of new perspective on animal intelligence and, if it's even possible, where we might draw a line that distinguishes humanity from all other things. for example: i wrote a bit about this book earlier this year in relation to voting, because it is not an inherently human concept. several animal species (bison, African wild dogs, and honeybees to name a few) make decisions through a voting process that can be clearly observed and explained.
3. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Ruha Benjamin): this book should probably be mandatory reading for literally anyone trying to get a computer science degree. so many of my experiences and concerns about technology and especially the internet are reflected by this book, and i am very much hoping to get to Ruha Benjamin's other work this year because this made me an instant fan.

   [...]the hypervisibility of Black celebrities, athletes, and politicians can mask the widespread disenfranchisement of Black communities through de facto segregation and the punishment apparatus. How can a society filled with millions of people cheering for LeBron, singing along to Beyoncé, tuning in to Oprah, and pining for the presidency of Obama be … racist? But alas, “Black faces in high places” is not an aberration but a key feature of a society structured by White supremacy.

4. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Timothy Snyder): this book became topical down the stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign and, unfortunately, looks only to be more salient in its aftermath. i am very much not a fan of Snyder's other work and his apparent tendency to treat the Soviets as a comparable political evil to Nazi Germany, but there is probably a place for this book on your shelf. for the most part, i think this book also offers reasonable advice. for example: "When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading." is a good way to put a good piece of advice. you should make an effort to broaden your horizons, challenge your worldview, refine what you believe, and investigate the things on which you intend to speak. this is a big reason i read so many books on so many subjects.
5. Tyranny of the Minority (Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky): a timely book by Ziblatt and Levitsky, authors of another book i quite like that was ominously called How Democracies Die and was quite pessimistic about the future of the United States. this book continues that trend by exploring the issue of minoritarianism in democracies, and how things are uniquely bad in the United States thanks to our aging Constitution. they do provide some prescriptions for how we might make things better, though, so it's not all doom and gloom. also has a lot of fun details about how our system came to suck so badly—and how many of the systems that are so defended today by conservatives are compromises and not reflective of what the Founding Fathers really "wanted".
6. Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis (Alice Bell): as indicated by the title this is a book which is a rather detailed history of climate change; but simultaneously—and what makes this book a particularly interesting pick-up—is its lengthy discussion of the social and technological developments that have accompanied and facilitated climate change. kind of the perfect book if you're the sort of person who wants to go down rabbit holes on the subject.

November

1. I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs, Meegan Lee Ochs, and David Cohen): Phil Ochs is mostly known for his musical talent, but he did do a lot of writing in his spare time. this is the first (and only?) book to collect most of that writing; it ranges from his amateur journalism in high school and college to his album liner notes and private poetry. overall quite a niche book, but if you're a real Ochs-head like i am this is a fairly indispensable addition to the bookshelf.
2. Coyote Settles the South (John Lane): a delightful little book by someone whose encounter with a coyote inspired them to travel the landscape of the American South and get a sense for how this unfamiliar creature is being received. this book includes one chapter on noted coyote celebrity Scooter, if you need an additional selling point.
3. Abolish Rent (Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal): one of the best and most important books of the year in my view, and a book that makes an incredibly compelling case for the eventual abolition of rent. i wrote at some length about how i think this book should inform the left and its broader political strategy—in short, it underscores the importance of organizing tenant unions and winning new rights for renters. and given that homelessness increased by 18% in 2024, this book is likely to be even more salient this year.

December

1. The Deluge (Stephen Markley): an epic novel (clocking in at nearly 900 pages) of politics, climate change, and eco-terrorism that i can only really compare to The Mandibles in how i feel about it. i continue to think about it over a month after beginning my reading, which is unusual for a fiction book. i would frankly not recommend this book if you're angsty about climate change and our current political situation; it is in many respects photorealistic and disturbingly plausible in its speculation of what the future holds. needless to say i can only hope that our real-world future is not the future that this book entails.
2. How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Andreas Malm): even if you disagree with its political conclusions, i would probably read this book. Andreas Malm looks to be one of the influential thinkers in the climate philosophy space and it's easy to see why—this is a rather hard to argue with dismantling of the nonviolent status quo that prevails in environmentalism (see also Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects the State).
3. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Antony Loewenstein): this book seems pretty straightforward to pitch to you: your government (local, state, or federal) probably uses some sort of military or surveillance technology that was developed in Israel, and probably used on Palestinians. it's good business for Israeli companies to have a permanent, live warzone in which these kinds of hardware can be tested, and it's even better business to export that hardware to both sympathetic and unsympathetic governments for use on their civilian populations. consider this book a peek behind the curtain of what might await you at your next protest.
4. Nuclear War : A Scenario (Annie Jacobsen): perhaps contrived, but chilling in a way few books can be. nuclear proliferation is a nightmare and in an ideal world everyone would swiftly dismantle their nuclear stockpiles.
5. Roadside Picnic (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky): i have very little to say of this book except that it is magisterial, and you can see why the STALKER series takes after it.
6. Thinking with Type (Ellen Lupton): i am skeptical you need my opinion on a book about typography, but i do endorse this one. the latest edition has a lot of neat additions.
7. Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Angie Schmitt): when you read this book, you'll really get a sense for why it is that U.S. cities (and to a lesser extent Canadian ones) are so bad at accomplishing Vision Zero. pedestrian (and alternative transit) infrastructure is a combination of nonexistent and disastrous, and pedestrians are mostly treated as a second class of citizens. luckily, this book isn't all doomerism. it rovides a lot of hope and optimism for how cities can fix their infrastructure—after all, some of the best cities for pedestrians in Europe today were previously some of the most car-brained—and how cities in the U.S. have begun to take up some of the changes to built infrastructure commonplace in European cities.
8. Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do about It (Daniel Knowles): finally, and rounding out the year, is Daniel Knowles' treatise on the harm done by cars and the necessity of a world far less reliant on it for transportation. this book should be in one sense cathartic, and in another sense infuriating—certainly in some ways it's quite a depressing book (such as in its descriptors of the developing world adopting car-centric urban infrastructure) but in others it is very hopeful (in explaining the many common-sense and easy changes we can make to incentivize alternative transportation and make things safer for pedestrians). and, for the road, one point in his conclusion that bears repeating:

   If we did not need [cars] as much, we could have a lot more left over to spend on whatever we want. And not needing as many cars is not some lofty, unrealistic goal. It is frankly bonkers to think that every family spending $5,000 to $10,000 a year on their own individual vehicle is the most efficient way of getting people around. We do not have to be so reliant on gasoline, cooking the planet to be able to live decent lifestyles. The important thing is not moving metal, it is moving people.

Comments

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That is a lot of reading.

You might like 2024 in Review or Reading Challenges over on goals_on_dw.