David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2016
Waggish 2017-09-09
2016 was a year of chaos for me as it was for many others. This list is provisional rather than a source of eternal endorsements. No, I did not read all of Anwar Sheikh’s Capitalism, but what I did read seemed serious and substantive enough to make it worthy of mention. Despite the inconsistencies of John Hands’ Cosmosapiens, I find it makes enough points about the traps of scientific orthodoxy to make it a provocative and worthy read. And there are books like Alec Ash’s Wish Lanterns that I simply didn’t get to.
I chose three books above all others as those that helped me get the most distance and perspective from the immediate tumult. Each of them did so in a very different way. Goodstein’s Simmel study is one of the few serious philosophical studies of Simmel and a major work, dedicated to showing his obscured influence through the 20th century and placing him alongside Musil as an eerily prescient prophet. It made a suitable epilogue to my commentary on Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.
Trentmann’s Empire of Things is an absorbing attempt to apply Annales-style ecological analysis to modern history and particularly the process of consumer consumption. It crosses Braudel with Veblen, yet the result sometimes approaches Simmel in its portrait of the self-reinforcing drives of consumption. As a portrait of larger ecological processes guiding our world, it pulled me away from the enveloping yet wholly reactive world of news and politics.
And Krasznahorkai’s chronicle of his travels in China is also a provider of needed distance, walking the path he has charted out that weaves between order and chaos, familiar and foreign, human and inhuman, beauty and suffering, profound knowledge and profound ignorance. He mentions Hungarian revolutionary Sándor Petőfi’s poem “Freedom, Love,” written with Hungarian which in Fu Yin’s translation (the book claims Lu Xun, but I believe this is inaccurate) became one of the most well-known poems in Communist China. With that irony in mind, it seems fitting to quote it here.
Szabadság, szerelem! E kettő kell nekem. Szerelmemért föláldozom Az életet, Szabadságért föláldozom Szerelmemet.
Liberty and love These two I must have. For my love I’ll sacrifice My life. For liberty I’ll sacrifice My love.
生命诚可贵， 爱情价更高。 若为自由故， 两者皆可抛。
Books of the Year
Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage (The Hungarian List) László Krasznahorkai Seagull Books
Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First Frank Trentmann Harper
Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary Elizabeth S. Goodstein Stanford University Press
Fiction
Between Dog and Wolf (Russian Library) Sasha Sokolov Columbia University Press
Fragments of Lichtenberg (French Literature) Pierre Senges Dalkey Archive Press
Bottom’s Dream (German Literature) Arno Schmidt Dalkey Archive Press
The Last Wolf & Herman László Krasznahorkai New Directions
Zama (New York Review Books Classics) Antonio Di Benedetto NYRB Classics
Bright Magic: Stories (New York Review Books Classics) Alfred Doblin NYRB Classics
Iza’s Ballad (New York Review Books Classics) Magda Szabo NYRB Classics
The Dispossessed: A Novel Szilard Borbely Harper Perennial
Berlin-Hamlet Szilárd Borbély NYRB Poets
Loving (New York Review Books Classics) Henry Green NYRB Classics
Caught (New York Review Books Classics) Henry Green NYRB Classics
Back (New York Review Books Classics) Henry Green NYRB Classics
The Invisibility Cloak (New York Review Books Classics) Ge Fei NYRB Classics
The Gradual Christopher Priest Titan Books
The Doomed City (Rediscovered Classics) Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Bromfield Andrew, Dmitry Glukhovsky Chicago Review Press
A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Translations from the Asian Classics) Li Zhi Columbia University Press
The Lights of Pointe-Noire: A Memoir Alain Mabanckou The New Press
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays Shirley Hazzard Columbia University Press
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 4, 1966-1989 Samuel Beckett Cambridge University Press
Soft City: The Lost Graphic Novel Hariton Pushwagner New York Review Comics
The One Hundred Nights of Hero: A Graphic Novel Isabel Greenberg Little, Brown and Company
Pascin Joann Sfar Uncivilized Books
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Pantheon Graphic Novels) Sonny Liew Pantheon
Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir Tom Hart St. Martin’s Press
Mickey’s Craziest Adventures (Mickey Mouse) Lewis Trondheim IDW Publishing
Dungeon: Monstres – Vol. 6: The Great Animator Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Stanislas, Nicolas Keramidas NBM Publishing
Nonfiction
The Face of the Buddha William Empson Oxford University Press
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness Peter Godfrey-Smith Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series) Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville The MIT Press
Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath Alexis de Tocqueville University of Virginia Press
Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity Michael Scott Basic Books
Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography Mark Rowlands Oxford University Press
The Voynich Manuscript Yale University Press
Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity Peter Olen Palgrave Macmillan
The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography Edmund Gordon Chatto & Windus
China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay Minxin Pei Harvard University Press
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Arlie Russell Hochschild The New Press
Europe since 1989: A History Philipp Ther Princeton University Press
Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing: A Historical and Social Study (History of Computing) William Aspray Springer
Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 Frederick C. Beiser Oxford University Press
Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History Thomas Rid W. W. Norton & Company
In the Darkroom Susan Faludi Metropolitan Books
Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought James T. Kloppenberg Oxford University Press
Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics (Routledge Studies in American Philosophy) Diana Heney Routledge
The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens (Castle Lectures Series) Samuel Bowles Yale University Press
The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962—1976 Frank Dikötter Bloomsbury Press
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America Elizabeth Hinton Harvard University Press
A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought) Sheldon Pollock Columbia University Press
Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization Branko Milanovic Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything Michael,Gross-Loh, Christine Puett Viking
America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History Andrew J. Bacevich Random House
Politics against Domination Ian Shapiro Harvard University Press
The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere Eric Smith, Harold J. Morowitz Cambridge University Press
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience (MIT Press) Todd E. Feinberg, Jon M. Mallatt The MIT Press
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) Benjamin Peters The MIT Press
The Poet’s Voice in the Making of Mind Russell Meares Routledge
Law in American History, Volume II: From Reconstruction Through the 1920s G. Edward White Oxford University Press
Reality and Its Dreams Raymond Geuss Harvard University Press
The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom Stephen M. Stigler Harvard University Press
The Ways of the World David Harvey Oxford University Press
Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe John Hands The Overlook Press
Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion Susan Jacoby Pantheon
The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (The Seeley Lectures) Richard Tuck Cambridge University Press
Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises Anwar Shaikh Oxford University Press
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior) Christopher H. Achen, Larry M. Bartels Princeton University Press
Democracy: A Life Paul Cartledge Oxford University Press
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) Robert J. Gordon Princeton University Press
Individuality and Entanglement: The Moral and Material Bases of Social Life Herbert Gintis Princeton University Press
The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature Cambridge University Press
Alchemist in Literature: From Dante to the Present Theodore Ziolkowski Oxford University Press
The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 Richard J. Evans Allen Lane
All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin Mikhail Zygar PublicAffairs
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) Walter Scheidel Princeton University Press
Medieval Europe Chris Wickham Yale University Press
The Great Convergence Richard Baldwin Harvard University Press
This Vast Southern Empire Matthew Karp Harvard University Press
Experimental Music Since 1970 Jennie Gottschalk Bloomsbury Academic
Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s Michael C. Heller University of California Press
American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History) Caroline Winterer Yale University Press
Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind Barbara Gail Montero OUP Oxford
The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution Michael J. Klarman Oxford University Press
Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New Aesthetic Paradigm (MIT Press) Tim Hodgkinson The MIT Press
Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates Jeffrey Bub OUP Oxford
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Yuval Noah Harari Harper
Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White Michael Tisserand Harper
Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets Luke Dittrich Random House
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