Book List 2017

Once again it’s time to make my wishlist of books I want to read this year and below that, a list the books I actually do get around to reading

You can also check out how I did the last couple of years on my Book Lists ‘08,  Book Lists ’09, Book Lists ’10,  Book Lists’ 11,  Book Lists ’12,  Book Lists 2013, Book Lists 2014, Book List 2015, and Book List 2016 pages.  Visit Library Thing to see every book I’ve ever read as well as my 100 favorite books of all time.

Books to Read in 2017

• Academy street : a novel by Mary Costello
• Alice by Christina Henry
• Archivist Wasp: a novel by Nicole Kornher-Stace
• The arm : inside the billion-dollar mystery of the most valuable commodity in sports by Jeff Passan
• Beneath the underdog by Charles Mingus
• Boxers & Saints  by Gene Yang
• Brown girl, brownstones by Paule Marshall
• Canon EOS Rebel T5/1200D For Dummies by Julie Adair King and Robert Correll
• Charity and Sylvia : a same-sex marriage in early America by Rachel Cleves
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• The dazzle of day by Molly Gloss
• The devil’s picnic : around the world in pursuit of forbidden fruit by Taras Grescoe
• Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky
• Encounters with silence by Karl Rahner
• The first collection of criticism by a living female rock critic by Jessica Hopper
• For white folks who teach in the hood– and the rest of y’all too : reality pedagogy and urban education by Christopher Emdin
• Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis
• Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music by Elijah Wald
• God and empire : Jesus against Rome, then and now by John Crossan 
• God help the child by Toni Morrison
• The Harlem Hellfightersby Max Brooks
• High Tides by Tom Bruno
• The humans who went extinct : why Neanderthals died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson
• The island at the center of the world [the epic story of Dutch Manhattan & the forgotten colony that shaped America] by Russell Shorto
• Jesus the rebel : bearer of God’s peace and justice by John Dear
• The jumbies by Tracey Baptiste
• The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America by Eric Jaffe
• The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies by Victoria Bynum
• Lumberjanes Vol. 2 by Noelle Stevenson
• A Manifesto for Nonviolent Revolution by George Lakey
• March: Book One by John Lewis
• The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand by Jen Downey
• Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyondby Marc Lamont Hill
• The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team by Ben Lindbergh
• Our revolution : a future to believe in by Bernard Sanders
• Roll with the Punches by Amy Gettinger
• Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond
• Saga by Brian Vaughan
• Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting by Erica Hirshler
• The Second Amendment : a biography by Michael Waldman
• The Secret Lives of Bats by Merlin Tuttle
• Sinatra! the song is you : a singer’s art by Will Friedwald
• Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye by Brad Warner
• Stranger Things Happen: Stories by Kelly Link
• The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement by Rev. Dr. William Barber II
• The tour guide : walking and talking New York by Jonathan Wynn
• The tyranny of the meritocracy : democratizing higher education in America by Lani Guinier
• This is an uprising : how nonviolent revolt is shaping the twenty-first century by Mark Engler
• Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr
• Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston by Jared Hardesty
• We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang
• Why busing failed : conservative politics, TV news, and the backlash to integration by Matthew Delmont
• Wild seed by Octavia Butler
• The Winter Cycling Survival Guide by Ramsay Rebecca
• Your song changed my lifeby Bob Boilen

Around the World for a Good Book

My Around the World For A Good Book project continues.

• China: The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan
• Djibouti: In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waber
• Finland :The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna(BPL, MLN, Hoopla)
• Guatemala: The President by Miguel Angel Asturias
• Ghana: Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
• Kuwait: The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi
• Morocco:The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun
• Syria: The Hedgehog by Zakaria Tamer

Audiobooks

• Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson
• All American Boys by Jason Reynolds (BPL, MLN)
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (BPL, MLN)
• Allegedlyby Tiffany D. Jackson
• An American Childhood by Annie Dillard (BPL, MLN, Hoopla)
• America’s original sin : racism, white privilege, and the bridge to a new America by Jim Wallis (Hoopla)
• Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (BPL, MLN, Hoopla)
• Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume (BPL, MLN)
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz (BPL, MLN, Hoopla)
• As You Wish by Cary Elwes (BPL, MLN)
• Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (BPL, MLN)
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (BPL)
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (BPL, MLN)
• Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Undermines America by Barbara Ehrenreich (MLN)
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (BPL, MLN)
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
• A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee  Brown (BPL, MLN, Hoopla)
• Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told through Baseball Cards by Josh Wilker (Hoopla)
• The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser (BPL)
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (BPL, MLN)
• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (BPL, MLN)
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (BPL, MLN)
• The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice by Chad Millman
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King (BPL)
• The Essential Lewis and Clark (BPL)
• Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Desmond, Matthew (MLN)
• The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King (Hoopla)
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman (BPL)
• Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon (MLN, Hoopla)
• The girl with all the gifts by Mike Carey (BPL)
• The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer by John Dominic Crossan (Hoopla)
• The Guts by Roddy Doyle (Hoopla)
• Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood (BPL, MLN)
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (BPL)
• The  Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed (Hoopla)
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (BPL, MLN)
• How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon
• Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girlby Carrie Brownstein
• The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (BPL, MLN)
• Independence Lost by Kathleen Duval (Hoopla)
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (Hoopla)
• The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough (MLN)
• The Last Week by Marcus Borg (Hoopla)
• The Lies of Locke Lamor by Scott Lynch (BPL, MLN, Hoopla)
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (BPL, MLN)
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Hoopla)
• Light in August by William Faulkner (BPL)
• The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (BPL, MLN)
• The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien (BPL, MLN)
• The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara W. Tuchman (BPL, Hoopla)
• Matida by Roald Dahl (BPL, MLN)
• My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand (BPL)
• The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox (BPL)
• Nothing Like it In the World by Stephen Ambrose (BPL)
• Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (BPL)
• Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil Degrasse Tyson (BPL)
• Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent by E.J. Dionne (Hoopla)
• The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough (BPL)
• Peacemaking: How to Be It, How to Do It by Thich Nhat Hanh (BPL)
• The pier falls : and other stories by Mark Haddon (MLN)
• The Pope and Mussolini by David I. Kertzer (MLN)
• The Power Broker by Robert Caro (BPL)
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman (BPL)
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood (Hoopla)
• The regional office is under attack! by Manuel Gonzales (BPL)
• Revolutionary Summer by Joseph Ellis (MLN)
• River of Doubtby Candice Millard
• The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson
• Sabriel by Garth Nix (BPL, MLN)
• Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore (BPL)
• Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan
• Scrappy Little Nobodyby Anna Kendrick
• Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants by Jane Goodall (MLN)
• Shadowshaper by Daniel Josâe Older (BPL, Hoopla)
• Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
• The Sisters Are Alright by Tamara Winfrey Harris
• So Close to Home by Michael J. Tougias
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (BPL, MLN)
• The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mohandas Ghandi (Hoopla)
• Swing Time by Zadie Smith
• Time and Again by Jack Finney (BPL)
• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild (Hoopla)
• To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (BPL, MLN)
• A Triumph of Genius by Ronald K. Fierstien (Hoopla)
• Truman by David McCullough (BPL)
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (BPL)
• Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang (BPL, MLN)
• Welcome To Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
• When Affirmative Action Was White  by Ira Katznelson (Hoopla)
• Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson (BPL, MLN)
• Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (BPL)

Books Read in 2017

And here are the books I’ve actually read.  The books are rated on a scale from 1 to 5 stars with links to summary reviews.

Here’s a thumbnail of what the ratings mean:

• 5 stars – all-time classic (I’m very stingy with these)
• 4 stars – a particularly interesting, well-written, or important book
• 3 stars – a good book from start to finish
• 2 stars – not a good book on the whole but has some good parts
• 1 star or less – basically a bad book with no redeeming values

January

• Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson (A) – ***1/2
• Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli  (A) – ***1/2
• So Close to Home by Michael J. Tougias (A) – ***
• The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice by Chad Millman (A) – ***
• Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr – ***1/2
• Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson (A) – ***1/2

February

• Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyondby Marc Lamont Hill – ****1/2
• The Walking Dead Vol. 25: No Turning Back by Robert Kirkman – **
• The Walking Dead Vol. 26: Call To Arms by Robert Kirkman – ***
• Frozen: The Cinestory by Robert Simpson – **
• How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon (A) – ****
• The devil’s picnic : around the world in pursuit of forbidden fruit by Taras Grescoe – ***1/2
• The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2017 by Bob Sehlinger and Len Testa – ****
• The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson (A) – ***1/2
• Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell (A) – ***1/2
• Your song changed my lifeby Bob Boilen (A) – ***

March

• The Disneyland Storyby Sam Gennawey – ****
• I Survived the Shark Attacks of 1916by Lauren Tarshis (A) – ***
• The Walking Dead Vol. 27: The Whisperer War by Robert Kirkman – **
• Our revolution : a future to believe in by Bernard Sanders – ***1/2
• Diary of a Wimpy Kidby Jeff Kinney
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel by Jeff Kinney
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down by Jeff Kinney

April

• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American Cityby Desmond, Matthew (A) – ****1/2
• Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne (A) – *****
• The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain (A) – ****
• The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World by Susan Veness – **
• Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girlby Carrie Brownstein (A) – ***1/2
• God and empire : Jesus against Rome, then and now by John Crossan – ****

May

• Ted & me: A Baseball Card Adventure by Dan Gutman
• Jackie & Me: A Baseball Card Adventure by Dan Gutman
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance (A)
• The Thinking Fan’s Guide to Walt Disney World: Magic Kingdomby Aaron Wallace

June

• Boston’s South End, The Clash of Ideas in a Historic Neighborhood by Russ Lopez – ****

July

• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (A) – ****
• Holy Spokes : The Search for Urban Spirituality on Two Wheelsby Laura Everett – *****

August

• River of Doubtby Candice Millard (A) – ***1/2
• We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler – **
• I Was Told to Come Aloneby Souad Mekhennet (A) – ***
• The humans who went extinct : why Neanderthals died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson – ***

September

• Acadia: The Complete Guide: Acadia National Park & Mount Desert Island by James Kaiser  – ****
• Granite, fire, and fog : the natural and cultural history of Acadia by Tom Wessels – ****
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (A) – ***
• Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield (A) – ****
• Democracy in Chainsby Nancy MacLean (A) – ***
• Roll with the Punches by Amy Gettinger – **
• Welcome To Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson (A) – **1/2
• The Harlem Hellfightersby Max Brooks – ***

October

• The Sword in the Stoneby T.H. White (A) – ****1/2
• A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger (A) – **1/2
• Swing Time by Zadie Smith (A) – **1/2
• The Secret Lives of Bats by Merlin Tuttle – ****
• Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan (A) – ***1/2
• The Sisters Are Alright by Tamara Winfrey Harris (A) – ***1/2

November

• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer (A) – ****
• The Ballet Loverby Barbara L. Baer – ***
• Allegedlyby Tiffany D. Jackson (A) – **1/2
• The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau (A) – **
• Gypsies of New Rochelle by Ivan Jenson – *
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (A) – ***1/2
• Scrappy Little Nobodyby Anna Kendrick (A)- ***1/2
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson – ****1/2
• Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick (A) – **
• Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky – ****

December

• The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde (A) – ****
• The Rook by Daniel O’Malley (A) – ***