2014 End of Year Booklist

This summer I decided to read more and higher-quality writing. I reduced the time I spent reading on the Internet to maybe twenty minutes a day and set aside time to read books instead. Looking back, I am happy I did it.

I think the biggest disappointment were the business books (Horowitz, Catmull, and Brooks). They are fun stories, but the lessons that can be applied to my own work are few and far between. Contrast those books with Truman, for example, which inspired leadership and courage when making difficult decisions. I hope to read one or two more biographies in 2015.

The fiction I read was delightful. Almost all the authors on the list were new to me, and I managed to cover some diverse ground, everything from struggling marriages to fly fishing to post-apocalyptic communes. Far from being an escape, these books encouraged more creative thinking and gave me some badly-needed decompression from work.

Here are my lists force-ranked from really great to just ok. I omitted a few stinkers.

Nonfiction

• Truman by David McCullough – My review
• Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
• Concepts of Genetics by Klug and Cumings
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (and a conservative critique)
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
• Business Adventures by John Brooks
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Fiction

• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
• A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean – My review
• Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Second Variety by Philip K Dick
• Great Short Stories by Great American Writers edited by Thomas Fasano
• The Early Poems of E.E. Cummings by E.E. Cummings