Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Books of 2015

I'm pretty proud of the reading I managed in 2015. I started the year finishing up my self-led course on virtue ethics (more on that in this post). I also honored my new year's resolution to read more substantive fiction this year (a resolution inspired in part by my interest in virtue ethics, incidentally). In addition to those below, I've got less than 100 pages to go in War and Peace, and I'll finish it by year's end barring hell, high water, and such.

Biggest surprise of the year: Structure of Scientific Revolutions was awesome, and made me realize I am apparently quite partial to postmodernism, at least as I currently understand it, and in what is probably one of its milder forms.

Socialism after Hayek was another delightful discovery. "Hayekian socialism" as a topic was just bound to be interesting, but I had no idea Burczak also appealed to the capabilities approach. This was fortuitous to find right after that little thing I wrote earlier this year.

Biggest disappointment was probably Burdened Virtues, which I expected to love based on my commitment to both feminism and virtue ethics. That said it was still interesting, and I don't regret reading it. Okay I take that back. The biggest disappointment of the year was Michel Foucault, which was so disappointing that I actually blocked it from my mind. I think I gave it one star on Goodreads.

Peace, Love, & Liberty, (Tom Palmer (ed.))
The Morality of Happiness (Julia Annas)
The State of the Art (Iain M Banks)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin)
Bourgeois Dignity (Deirdre McCloskey)
Burdened Virtues (Lisa Tessman)
Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Daniel C Russell)
Socialism After Hayek (Theodore Burczak)
Cordelia's Honor (Lois McMaster Bujold)
feminist theory: from margin to center (bell hooks)
On Liberty (John Stuart Mill)
The Subjection of Women (John Stuart Mill)
The History of Sexuality, Part 1 (Michel Foucault)
The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Daniel C Russell (ed.))
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, tentative)

Great list, right? Well, one thing that bites is I basically sacrificed all my reading of the Economist. I regret this and I'm resolving not to let that happen again next year. I'll probably read many fewer books next year because I want to get back in the Economist's good graces. Consider that a resolution.

Another resolution: read more sci-fi/fantasy! A few months ago I took one of those online quizzes that ask you what sci-fi/fantasy books you've read. Almost all my friends blew me out of the water. I consider speculative fiction to be part of my identity, so this made me feel like a bit of an impostor. I want to read at least five books next year. Probably going to start with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, then read some more Bujold.

Otherwise, I plan to read a bit of feminism and a bit of libertarianism. Susan Moller Okin, Elizabeth Anderson, and Seyla Benhabib are all on the list. And it seems like a few of the libertarian public intellectuals I stalk have books coming out in 2016 (although maybe I'm being optimistic here). And there are some classics like Nozick I feel I should get to at some point.