I ended up reading surprisingly few books this past year, as I focused on more tangible sabbatical projects. A few of these books I read async with a group of people; I’m excited to share how to do this well in the future.
For my favourite book, it’s a toss-up between The Taming of Chance, and The Blacktongue Thief.
I got into The Taming of Chance as I wanted to inform my intuition about how institutions take action on probabilistic metrics; relevant for me as I used to run large-scale user studies at Meta, and machine learning and semi-crowdsourced big data are used by everyone organization in this era.
The Blacktongue Thief was an incredible surprise; a very fast-paced, ecologically-grounded fantasy book that did magic and local cultural boundaries in a rich way, without tedious expositional infodumping. I read it twice, and have moved onto the prequel, The Daughter’s War. Like many great things (Terminator 2, Harrow The Ninth, Alien$) The Daughter’s War is set in the same world, but feels like an entirely different genre.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus – Charles C. Mann
This is How You Lose The Time War – Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
The Social Game – Scott Jon Siegel
Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid in The Omelas Hole – Isabel J. Kim
The History of the Devil – Clive Barker
The Octagon House: A Home For All – Orson S. Fowler
The Nose – Nikolai Gogol
The Jakarta Method – Vincent Bevins
Galilee – Clive Barker
The Black Book – Orhan Pamuk
The Taming of Chance – Ian Hacking
The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Elder Race – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Word for World is Forest – Ursula K. Le Guin
The Man Who Loved China – Simon Winchester
The Rigor of Angels – William Egginton
How To Blow Up A Pipeline – Andreas Malm
Micromégas – Voltaire
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – James C. Scott
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better – Monica Heisey
The Eleven Laws of Showrunning – Javier Grillo-Marxuach
The Blacktongue Thief – Christopher Buehlman
Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges (with introduction by William Gibson)
Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings – Ken Williams
Dwarven Warfare – Chris Pramas