The list this year has more fiction than nonfiction: I read a lot of great novels this year, but the nonfiction was more hit-or-miss. In alphabetical order by author, since I can’t come up with a satisfying way of ranking them. I usually do a lot of reading in December, and am desperate to get back on my reading schedule after a month or more dealing with moving house and renovating, etc, so I may update this later if I finish something else quite good before Jan. 1.

Nonfiction

• The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, by W. Brian Arthur. The rare book that delivers exactly what it promises in the title. These days we are constantly inundated with pronouncements, analyses and prognostications about technology and its impact on our lives. Yet for something so important, the general principles of how technology works are very poorly understood. There is an emptiness at the heart of many arguments about technology, which treat it as a mysterious separate universe whose inner laws can only by divined by the cognoscenti. Arthur cuts through the cant with brilliantly clear and simple prose, and logically and rigorously develops nothing less than a General Theory of Technology. We learn to see technologies not as isolated units — “fruits” plucked from a tree, be they low-hanging or high, in one popular metaphor — but as collections of elements that are constantly evolving and combining. Among other things, Arthur explains not only why modern technological progress, once started, is not going to stop, but also why that progress is never consistent or even. I found it tremendously refreshing and very insightful, and all in all an essential toolkit for understanding the world around us.
• Invention of the Modern World, by Alan MacFarlane. An excellent entry into the crowded field of “how to explain the modern world” books. It attempts to answer the question of where the Industrial Revolution and modern life came from by a deep dive into the particulars of English history. MacFarlane is anthropologist by training, though he has spent most of his career not writing about the traditional societies that anthropologists (ahem) traditionally focus on. Fittingly, however, his argument is essentially anthropological: that the patterns of the modern technological economy reflect a particular social structure, and that England developed this social structure first for a variety of contingent but identifiable historical reasons. Very readable, thanks to its origins as a series of lectures for Chinese students, and while the England-as-origin-of-all-things thesis goes overboard occasionally, it is mostly pretty convincing.
• Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, by William Janeway. A strange and not always terribly readable book, it was nonetheless one of the most thought-provoking I encountered this year, so makes the list. Janeway is a private-equity investor with an academic bent, and the book uses his own experience to develop general ideas on how innovation and technology work and are financed in the real world. Strangely, the detailed anecdotes about particular companies and technologies were mostly uninteresting, while the general reflections I found excellent (usually it is the other way around).
• Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe. Not a fun read, but an engrossing and thoughtful one, and consistently fascinating. The book is essentially a survey of all the terrible things people in Europe did to each other after the end of official fighting. Much of the motivation and the value of the book is in just documenting these lesser-known events. But it also develops an argument that much of the so-called postwar political order that we take for granted–the Cold War, division of Germany, etc–was actually driven as much by the events after the cessation of formal hostilities in Europe as it was by the pattern of winners and losers.
• Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II 1937-1945, by Rana Mitter, and Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta. This year I fortuitously read a great combination of new books on World War II from an Asian perspective: the first a reconsideration of China’s role in the world war, the second an account of how Japan’s (apparently highly dysfunctional) system decided to go to war against the US. Both are lively and very readable. Mitter argues for a more generous understanding of what Chiang Kai-shek accomplished by not losing the war against the Japanese invaders, where many previous accounts have emphasized his many failures. In particular Mitter says China’s contribution to the global balance of the war is underappreciated: by keeping hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops tied down in China, Chiang limited Japan’s ability to attack other countries and make the war in Asia even worse than it was. The book also has lots of great material from archives on the Chinese experience of the war, including a stunning description of the firebombing of Chongqing. Hotta’s book is a more straightforward narrative history of the runup to the attack on Pearl Harbor–which led to a war that many Japanese knew they could not win. There is a zone of silence at the core of the book, since the available sources just do not tell us enough about what the emperor and those around him were thinking at the time. But it is nonetheless a very useful portrait of how a political system made a series of disastrous decisions that led to its own undoing.

Fiction

• The Broken Sword, by Poul Anderson. Now that the works of J.R.R. Tolkien have been transformed into multimedia mass-culture extravaganzas, it’s hard to remember a time when “fantasy” referred to anything other than variations on Tolkien’s themes. But The Broken Sword predates the commercial fantasy genre, and offers a glimpse at the road not taken. This book is slim and often grim, Nordic rather than Anglo-Saxon, and in many ways the antithesis of the epic and optimistic Lord of the Rings. It’s a work that, sadly, remains unique, having spawned no followers and no imitators.
• Life after Life, by Kate Atkinson. One of the central facts of our lives is that they are contingent: we know that things could have happened otherwise. But they didn’t, and so we never really know what might have been. This extraordinary book explores this theme through the conceit of a woman who lives her life over and over again, making different choices and having different accidents, until she gets it “right.” But it’s not the sterile working-out of an abstract philosophical concept, but a concrete, charming and often funny story. The depiction of how the same girl grows up into several very different people is brilliantly true. Hands down the best novel I read in 2014, and criminally overlooked by the various prize-giving outfits.
• Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. What would you do if your childhood friend, the one you played videogames and smoked pot with, grew up and decided to kill off most of humanity? I don’t think you would handle it all that well, and the shattered protagonist of this book has plenty of problems. I’ve always had a weakness for life-among-the-ruins post-apocalypse stories, but a wonderful voice and storytelling structure set this one apart and make it truly literary. After reading this, you will want to read Atwood’s two sequels — the last one, MaddAddam, came out this year — but while enjoyable they do not achieve the same hallucinatory power.
• An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris. A novelization of the Dreyfus affair that, like Harris’ previous historical novels, is among the classiest of page-turners. It is no mean feat to make a suspenseful novel about events that are so widely known, but he has managed it. The contemporary resonance of the events is clear but not overdone.
• Euphoria, by Lily King. As a former anthropologist, how could I resist a novel based on the relationship between Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson? While I had to read it for these reasons, the rest of you should read it since it is purely a good book. The description of the anthropologists’ fieldwork among the New Guinea tribes rings true, the love story is poignant, and the writing about the joys of intellectual endeavor (the euphoria of the title) is brilliant. It falls apart a bit with an implausible plot twist at the end, but is otherwise thoroughly enjoyable.
• Submergence, by J.M. Ledgard. A spy is taken hostage in Somalia; a marine biologist ponders the mysteries of existence. The yoking together of two such radically different narratives is occasionally too stylized, but the writing is good and so closely observed as to make up for it, especially in the Somalia scenes. And unlike so much literary fiction it feels deeply interested in real things happening in the world. Runner up in the literary-fiction-set-in-Africa category: The Laughing Monsters, by Denis Johnson.
• The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry. The classic novel of small-town life and its limits. I also grew up in a small, isolated town, and while my life was nothing like this, the portrait is true and spare. I also read McMurty’s Horseman, Pass By this year, which has the same setting and some similar themes, but this is better.
• American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar. Sadly, I can’t claim to be cool enough to have read this before the movie came out. But I loved the movie, and reading the original comics has been on my to-do list for a long time, and I’m very glad to have finally done it. The tagline is “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff,” and you have to admire how aggressively Pekar mines banal interactions with coworkers and others for his material. It does not always work, and some of the later pieces are too self-absorbed, but the best moments are a true and deeply personal artistic achievement.
• We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas. The sample first chapters on the Kindle version hooked me with a promise of a lyrical but closely observed portrait of Irish immigrants in the 1950s. Bait-and-switch: the book turns into something completely different along the way, much in the way that actual life does. Most of the novel is a heartbreakingly clear portrait of age and infirmity. Perhaps longer than it absolutely needed to be, but I never regretted the time spent on these pages.
• Shaman, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Yes, it’s a novel about “primitive” life in the Ice Age. And yes, it’s actually good. Unlike almost any of the other attempts to imagine this part of human history, Robinson’s depictions of early tribal life are realistic, plausible and moving. And the nature writing is fantastic. Compelling and truly original.

• The Best American Essays 2012, edited by David Brooks. I read a lot of these kind of collections of shorter nonfiction pieces, but this one really stood out in terms of consistency and quality. I often find Brooks’ columns annoying but he did a great job selecting interesting and well written essays (the 2011 edition by contrast was awful).
• Essays in Biography, by Joseph Epstein. More than just an essay collection, almost a potted history of mid-twentieth century intellectual life. Epstein is always a great writer and his personal takes on various figures, while not exactly biographies, are unsparing and insightful.
• A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Possibly the best travel writing ever, and I generally despise travel writing. Spectacular prose and a fascinating window onto prewar Europe.
• Engineers of Victory: the Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, by Paul Kennedy. A fascinating analytical history of the second world war that takes the focus away from generals and presidents treats it as a series of problems to be solved, and details just how they were solved. A great read.
• Freedom From Fear: the American People in Depression and War 1929-1945, by David M. Kennedy. A prize-winning history of the 1930s and 1940s that is always lively, interesting and keeps you turning the pages. The standout for me, having read a lot of more economic histories of the Great Depression, is the discussion of politics and social change in the 1930s.
• The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Classic historical essays that are still lively and fresh a half-century after their first appearance The first few especially are amazing pieces that read like whodunits as TR sorts through competing explanations for sweeping historical events before finally arriving, inevitably, at the solution.

• Any Day Now, by Terry Bisson. A young man coming of age is caught up in the social turmoil of the 1960s; a familiar premise and you think you know where it is going, but trust me, you don’t.
• Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends, by Jane Gardam. A trilogy of sorts about a bunch of old English coots. Old Filth itself is a perfect novel, funny and wry and moving, and the subsequent books extend the story by considering it from different points of view.
• Tinkers, by Paul Harding. A short and beautifully written book recounting an old man’s vivid memories at the end of his life.
• The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes. I thought I had read all the midcentury good noir out there but had missed this one — will not describe further for fear of spoiling the fantastic twist about a third of the way through that makes this much more than a mystery.
• The Summer Isles, by Ian R. MacLeod. An unexpectedly moving and personal story set in a Britain that lost the first world war and became a fascist state.
• Stoner, by John Williams. A perfect novel, hard to describe but wonderful in every way. The story of one ordinary man’s life and its disappointments. I realize that this is the second book on this list I called perfect, and in both cases it is fully warranted and not hyperbole.

Nonfiction

• Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. An amazing piece of journalism and a window into real life in the world’s most isolated country. Essential reading for humans.
• The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam. Having never been taught proper American history in school, I never really knew anything about the Korean War other than what I saw on M*A*S*H*, so this really filled in a huge gap in my knowledge. Split equally between close, first-person accounts of key battles and the political maneuvering back in the US.
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann. Not a new book and I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been said by many other reviewers. Awesome, fascinating on almost every page.
• Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-1942, by Ian Toll. A terrific piece of narrative history, from which I learned a lot about those pivotal historical moments you hear about in school but never really really understand. It is lifted out of the ordinary by a sweeping account of the role of the Navy in US history, and an extraordinary account of the attack on Pearl Harbor that weaves together tons of first-person accounts of how it was actually experienced.

Fiction 

• Jamrach’s Menagerie, by Carol Birch. A wonderfully written story of a boy and a tiger at sea in the 19th century. Nothing whatsoever to do with Life of Pi.
• Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon. The latest by Chabon is self-recommending – the language is wonderful, the story is moving and often hilarious.
• Open City, by Teju Cole. Very reminiscent of the discursive yet compelling reveries of W.G. Sebald, of which I am also a big fan.
• A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers. Guy goes to Saudi Arabia to give a Powerpoint presentation. Sits in hotel a lot, misses various appointments. And yet the story manages to be very compelling – and written in a spare style completely unlike the over-the-top confessional voice he used for his memoir.
• The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford. A classic of alternate history, retelling the story of Richard III in a Europe where Christianity never spread. Dense, complex and challenging.
• Capital, by John Lanchester. On balance probably the best novel I read in 2012. Funny, a great read, and very relevant.
• Bring Up The Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. The sequel to Wolf Hall. Won the Booker. Totally engrossing and awesome in very way, basically.
• True Grit and Norwood, by Charles Portis. Apparently Portis’ books used to be taught in schools but these days is mostly forgotten. I read True Grit on a whim after seeing the most recent movie adaptation, and it is surprisingly wonderful, mostly because of the very distinctive voice in which it is told. The same is true for Norwood, a short comic novel, except here the voice is of a Southern redneck rather than a frontier widow. The virtuosity of Portis as a writer becomes especially clear when these two books are read together, since they bear absolutely no relation to one another.
• The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, by Michael Swanwick. A sadly out-of-print classic by one of the most creative SF authors around. Upends almost every fantasy cliche about fairies and dragons with gleeful abandon  in a narrative that compels you by its sheer strangeness and dreamlike logic.
• Among Others, by Jo Walton. This new book has swept the sci-fi industry awards, winning both the Hugo and Nebula, and it’s not hard to see why – it’s a sci-fi novel about an isolated teenager who reads sci-fi. The premise sounds precious but is not, actually, and the book is wonderfully written in a unique and very genuine voice.