Scanning miles of sentences remains enormously effective.

Books I've read and enjoyed—and some I didn't—in various ways, this year:

Favorites

A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander et al
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Zero to One: On Startups Or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
Iron Council - China Miéville
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies - Geoffrey West
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - Peter Bernstein
Testament - G. C. Waldrep
> "Consciousness has a breakeven aesthetic."

The Sublime Object of Ideology - Slavoj Zizek
Black Elk Speaks - John G Neihardt
How to Write a Sentence - Stanley Fish
Permanent Record - Edward Snowden
On Growth and Form - D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (published in 1917, recommended by Geoffrey West in Scale)
Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World - Tim Marshall
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words - David Whyte
Des Choses Cachées depuis la Fondation du Monde - Réne Girard
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World - Réne Girard
At the Mountains of Madness - Howard Philiips Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie - Michel Houellebecq
The Origins of the World, Volume 1: Before Sarajevo - Sidney Bradshaw Fay
Safe Area Goražde - Joe Sacco
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values - Robert M. Pirsig
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell ... Coming of age story of a young poet in a small town; meets Madame Crommelynk from Cloud Atlas, who teaches him about beauty and truth
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government - Thomas Paine
Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained - Milton
De Anima (On the Soul) - Aristotle
Spinoza: Complete Works - Spinoza
Modern Principles of Economics - Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok
Lords of Finance: The Bankers that Broke the World - Liaquat Ahamed
The Twenty Years' Crisis - E. H. Carr
Politics Among Nations - Hans Morgenthau (multipolar more stable than bipolar & innate desire for power) 1948
Theory of International Politics - Kenneth N. Waltz (structural realism--survival; challenges Morgenthau's multipolar) 1979
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics - John J. Mearsheimer (offensive realism) 2001
Serotonin - Michel Houellebecq
Serotonine - Michel Houellebecq
The Big Sea - Langston Hughes
What Doesn't Kill Us - Scott Carney (unlocking/activating deep physiological capabilities)
The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson
Big Debt Crises - Ray Dalio
Aquinas: A Summary of Philosophy - Richard J. Regan (translated & edited)
Beyond Good and Evil - Freidrich Nietzsche
The White Goddess - Robert Graves
The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Submission - Michel Houellebecq
Soumission - Michel Houellebecq
An Introduction to English Poetry - James Fenton
Metamorphoses - Ovid
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Pale King - David Foster Wallace
Ordinary Unhappiness - Jon Baskin
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture - Johan Huizinga
Collected Poems - Mark Strand