Time for my annual book post chronicling my reading and celebrating the ever-increasing availability of books to blind readers worldwide!

2023 felt like five years squished into one. We just did a lot of living this year, on every level, and surprisingly this didn’t cut into my reading at all. I read seventy books (not counting stuff directly related to research).

In previous years, I’ve gone a little overboard doing reviews for my favorites, but this year I’m not feeling the inspiration. It’s been such a diverse and interesting year of reading that I would scarcely know how to pick winners anyhow. There are only maybe two or three that I wouldn’t recommend to someone sometime in some frame of mind. So if you see something interesting in the list below assume I don’t think it’s terrible—and feel free to ask about it!

The List

• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgment of taste by Pierre Bourdieu
• The Power by Naomi Alderman
• Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
• How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World by Deb Chachra
• Hello, Beautiful! by Anne Napolitano
• Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
• Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara
• Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz
• Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
• Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
• Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani
• Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
• Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew
• Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kelly Carter Jackson
• Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
• A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk and Robot #2) by Becky Chambers
• Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Sophus Helle
• The Lunar Chronicles (Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter) by Marissa Meyer
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
• The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
• Work WOn’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate by Naomi Klein
• The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience by Toby Hemingway
• Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown
• The Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture: Creating an Edible Ecosystem by Christopher Shein
• Building a Better World in Your Backyard (Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys) by Paul Wheaton (re-read)
• Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments can Teach Us about the Good Life by Kristen R. Ghodsee
• The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture by Konrad Schmid
• The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg
• The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty #1) by Ken Liu
• Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
• Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry
• This is How YOu Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
• Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft
• The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education by John K. Wilson
• The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy by John Shelton
• Wilding by Isabella Tree
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
• Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke
• In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by J. Jack Halberstam
• Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
• The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune
• Undoing Gender by Judith Butler
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• A Place to Hang the Moon by kate Albus
• The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed-Race Belonging by Samira Maida
• The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University by Adrianna Kezar
• Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of Gods) by N. K. Jemisin
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• American War by Omar El Akkad
• Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
• The Amorites in the Bronze Age near East: The Making of a Regional Identity by Aaron Burke
• No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba
• The River of Silver by S. A. Chakraborty
• The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
• The Reindeer Chronicles, and Other Inspiring Stories of Working with nature to Heal the Earth by Judith D. Schwartz
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by J. Jack Halberstam
• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks