Friday, January 10, 2020

Favorite Books of the Last Decade

It seems the height of hubris to declare the "best books of the decade", when I read perhaps three hundred in that time span, while a couple of million books are published each year, most in languages I can't read. But at the same time, it's kind of nice to look back and think about which ones I read that have stayed with me. Most of these are pretty obvious choices; I don't think I'm saying much controversial here. Links go to my Goodreads reviews, where available, though most of the time I don't really write formal reviews. Also, note that this is books I read last decade, but many of the books themselves are older.
  • Best General Science/Space History/Memoir: Lab Girl (previous decade: Riding Rockets; Honorable Mention: The Big Picture, We Have No Idea)
  • Best Novel by a Nobelist: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Honorable Mention by a non-Nobelist: The Sea of Fertility)
  • Best Whatever the Heck This Is: Self-Reference ENGINE
  • Best IT-Related Nonfiction: Superintelligence (Honorable Mentions: The Codebreakers, The Book of Why, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, The Golden Ticket) Not without significant shortcomings, but a great springboard for conversation; there is also an even longer version of my review of this somewhere...
  • Best Space Opera/Hard SF: Ancillary Justice (Very Honorable Mention: Three Body Problem)
  • Best Cyberpunk: Daemon and Freedom(TM)
  • Best Fantasy/Speculative Fiction: The Fifth Season
  • Best History/Analysis: Why Nations Fail
  • Best History/Big Picture Narrative: The Civil War Trilogy Apparently I didn't write a review, but I loved these books. Stiff competition from others on WWI, WWII, and topics such as the Crusades, the history of Islam, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, though.
  • Best History/Tight Focus: Hidden Figures
  • Best Mystery: The City and the City
  • Best Hard Boiled/Noir:  The Maltese Falcon (I enjoyed rereading my own review! I should put in the effort more often.)
  • Best Collection: The Found and the Lost
I'm sure I'll come back to this at some point and go, "Geez, what was I thinking when I left out...?!?" but this short list will have to do for now!

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