Read in 2019

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2019 is dead, may it rest in peace.  One thing I hope to take from the year, though, is all the things I learned in the books I finished that year.   I'm not going to review them all, there are too many, but I'll break them down into categories and bold the ones I particularly liked.  Within a category there're in chronological order, except when I mixed them up when reshuffling categories but it should be mostly right.  Some books are hard to categorize, for instance is a history of DARPA science or technology?  So it's a bit arbitrary but hopefully useful.

Science

  • The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses by Peter Brannen
  • The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran
  • Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (reread) by Nick Lane
  • The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie 
  • Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
  • What We Know about Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel


Technology

  • The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen
  • The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J Harris
  • How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
  • The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Eric Brynjolfsson
  • One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman
  • Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe by David Dekenberger
  • Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World by Paul Shapiro
  • Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall
  • The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper in Space Using the Moon's Resources by Paul D. Spudis


History

  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
  • The Pursuit of Power by William Hardy McNeill
  • Bury the Chains by Adam Horschild
  • Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by WaltBenjamin Franklin: An American Lifeer Isaacson
  • Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
  • Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 by James T Peterson
  • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony
  • 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H Cline
  • The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 by Richard J Evans
  • Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
  • The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine
  • Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
  • Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough
  • The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple
  • Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes
  • The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un by Fifield, Anna 


Development Economics

  • The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun
  • Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee
  • Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Shiedel
  • How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell
  • The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier


Fiction

  • Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovich
  • The Labrynth Index by Charles Stross
  • River of Gods by Ian McDonald
  • Blood Music by Greg Bear
  • Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling by Bruce Sterling
  • The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
  • Revenger by Alistair Reynolds
  • The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
  • The January Dancer (reread) by Michael Flynn
  • The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
  • The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
  • Nation by Terry Pratchett
  • Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
  • Dragon (reread) by Steven Brust
  • The Iron Dragon's Mother by Michael Swanwick
  • Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh
  • Delta-V by Daniel Suarez
  • October Man by Ben Aaronovich
  • The White Queen by Phillipa Gregory
  • Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser
  • We Are Legion by Dennis E. Taylor
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone 
  • The Best of Michael Swanwick by Michael Swanwick
  • Mission of Honor by David Webber


Misc

  • Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennet
  • The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C Shoup
  • Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
  • Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels
  • Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by Robert A. Pape
  • Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cedric Villani
  • How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Monroe
  • Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
  • Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan
  • Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

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