Just proud of myself and wanted to brag, but I missed that post from a few days ago. AMA about any of these if you're curious:
books
January
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Robert Nichols - Theft is Property!
Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem
Tom O'Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Andre Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Aph Ko - Racism as Zoological Witchcraft
Various Authors - Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Fiction
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, & Pun Ngai - Dying for an iPhone
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Found and the Lost (13 novellas)
W. E. B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
Brian Moore - The Magician's Wife
February
Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imaginaries
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
William Blum - Killing Hope
Michelle Good - Five Little Indians
Kristen J. Sollée - Witches, Sluts, Feminists
March
Catherine Hernandez - Scarborough
Jane Jacobs - The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Omar El Akkad - What Strange Paradise
Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols - The Rust Programming Language
Esi Edugyan - Washington Black
April
Clayton Thomas-Müeller - Life in the City of Dirty Water
Marcel Proust - In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Aditya Bhargava - Grokking Algorithms
Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest
May
Karl Marx - Capital Vol. 3
June
Peter Watts - Blindsight
John P. Clark - Between Earth and Empire
Marcel Proust - Guermantes Way
Jessica Fern - Polysecure
Sara Collins - Confessions of Frannie Langton
G. W. F. Hegel - Introduction to the Philosophy of History
July
Xiran Jay Zhao - Iron Widow
Kim Moody - Tramps and Trade Union Travelers
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Itzik Ben-Gan - T-SQL Fundamentals
August
Homer - The Illiad
Keith Basso - Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
September
Marcel Proust - Sodom and Gomorrah
Richard Lachmann - First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
October
Marcel Proust - The Prisoner
James Ladyman and Don Ross - Every Thing Must Go
November
Marcel Proust - The Fugitive
Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté - The Myth of Normal
Nora Roberts - Origin in Death
Stephanie Kelton - The Deficit Myth
December
Marcel Proust - Finding Time Again
Tyler A. Shipley - Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination
Adrienne Maree Brown - Grievers
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
At least tell us which ones you liked the most. Any faves ? or things you would really recommend ?
I'll skim over a few.
As for fiction: Proust is amazing but not really comparable to other fiction. I might recommend but see my other comment for caveats. Definitely try some Ursula K. Leguin if you get the chance. Confessions of Frannie Langton is a wild ride if you want all the evils of 19th century plus a very forbidden lesbian romance. Iron Widow is a great new YA fantasy book set in a fictionalized China, if that's up your alley. My Brilliant Friend is just solid - interesting characters and a very human-feeling story that starts in mid-century Italy - and I'm excited to continue. Origin in Death is the trashiest thing I've ever read.
As for non-fiction: Theft is Property! is actually a great read and a solid philosophical exploration of the question: "if Indigenous people didn't have a Western conception of property rights, how can it be said that the land was stolen from them?" Chaos is great and a bit unnerving, answering a few questions about Manson and that time period but prompting many more. W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the most elegant writers on my list here for sure and really elucidates the failures of the reconstruction era. Killing Hope is a leftist classic if you want an itinerary of everywhere the long arm of US imperialism fucked shit up. Wisdom Sits in Places, a look at how knowledge is stored among the Western Apache (among many other things), was fascinating but I'm always a sucker for anthropology that breaks open my brain a little. Probably 60% of Every Thing Must Go went over my head but it's a philosophical position (ontic structural realism) that I feel in the deepest depths of my soul so it was nice to have validated. Canada in the World is :kkkanada: in book form if you know anyone who's a little too patriotic.