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1. Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning, Philip Kennicott
2. The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life, Kyle Beachy
3. Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, Michael Bierut
4. Suppose a Sentence: Brian Dillon
5. Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake (Eds., Tamara Schenkenberg and Donna Wingate)
6. Three Women, Lisa Taddeo
7. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib
8. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand
9. Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy, Paula Marantz Cohen
10. Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, Kelefa Sanneh
11. The Monocle Book of Homes (Monocle)
12. The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, Jim McKelvey
13. Studio Culture Now (Ed. Mark Sinclair)
14. The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, Kati Marton
15. Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, Adam Nayman
16. This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century, Steven Hyden
17. After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, Ben Rhodes
18. Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald
19. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
20. The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer, Christopher Clarey
21. Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer
22. Seeing Serena, Gerald Marzorati
23. Graphic Life, Michael Gericke
24. How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims
25. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, paired with Twelve New Essays by Jessica Helfand
26. Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century, Tim Higgins
27. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alter
28. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
29. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Adam Grant
3. Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
4. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen
5. Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri
6. The Morning Star, Karl Ove Knausgaard
7. Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney
8. The Sellout, Paul Beatty
9. Tenth of December, George Saunders
10. My Heart, Semezdin Mehmedinović
11. Fox 8, George Saunders
12. The Carrying: Poems, Ada Limon
13. New Teeth, Simon Rich
The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison Uncanny Valley, Anna Weiner Our Man: Richard Holbrooke…, George Packer Having and Being Had, Eula Biss My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong Promised Land, Barack Obama Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian My Life in France, Julia Child Monocle: How to Make a Nation The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann Normal People, Sally Rooney The Lying Lives of Adults, Elena Ferrante How to Be a Family, Dan Kois Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece, Alex Beam The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, Sarah Frier Go Ahead in the Rain, Hanif Abdurraqub How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski Dark Mirror, Barton Gellman To Start a War, Robert Draper The Spy Masters:, Chris Whipple Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré The Monocle Guide to Better Living Hell and Other Destinations, Madeline Albright The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger Bitter Brew, William Knoedelseder On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong The Gathering, Anne Enright Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, David W. Blight Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy Grand Union: Stories, Zadie Smith Beastie Boys Book, Michael Diamond, et. al Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney The Mueller Report, Robert S. Mueller III et. al The World of Charles and Ray Eames Sontag: Her Life and Work, Benjamin Moser Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert A. Caro The Indispensable Composers, Anthony Tommasini Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner Meditations, Marcus Aurelius Parisian Lives: Deirdre Bair Poetics of the Everyday (SLAM on John Foster!) The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power Striking Power, Edward Bleiberg and Stephanie Weissberg It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Fried and Heinemeier Hansson What We Lose, Zanzibar Clemmons Breaking News, Alan Rusbridger Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Mike Isaac Dreyer’s English, Benjamin Dreyer Dear Data, Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec Finding My Voice, Valerie Jarrett Call Them by Their True Names, Rebecca Solnit Shortest Way Home, Pete Buttigieg Avid Reader: A Life, Robert Gottlieb Design and Content, Abbott Miller Reading Between the Wines, Terry Theise We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates My Struggle: Book 6, Karl Ove Knausgård The Odyssey, Homer (Emily Wilson, tr.) Feel Free: Essays, Zadie Smith Lost Property, Ben Sonnenberg (again) Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form The World As It Is, Ben Rhodes Obama: An Intimate Portrait, Pete Souza Architecture's Odd Couple, Hugh Howard Yes We (Still) Can, Dan Pfeiffer Happiness: Ten Years of n+1 Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma, Michelle White The Threat Matrix, Garrett M. Graff Magnitude, Kimberly K. Arcand A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir, Ian Buruma Saving Central Park, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers An Equation for Every Occasion, John M. Henshaw Made to Stick, Chip Heath My Struggle: Book 5, Karl Ove Knausgård Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, John Hodgman Now You See It and Other Essays on Design, Michael Bierut Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, Karl Ove Knausgård and Fredrik Ekelund Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah Obama: The Call of History, Peter Baker Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure, Bianca Bosker A Separation, Katie Kitamura Paul Rand: A Designer's Art More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers, Jonathan Lethem Powers of Ten, Philip Morrison Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind, Peter D. Kramer Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter How to..., Michael Bierut Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast My Struggle: Book 4, Karl Ove Knausgård The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead My Struggle: Book 3, Karl Ove Knausgård Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante Known and Strange Things: Essays, Teju Cole The Monocle Guide to Cosy Homes, Monocle Nobody Grew but the Business, Joseph Tabbi Notorious RGB, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando, Michael Auping Max Beckmann at SLAM: The Paintings, Lynette Roth Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, David Axelrod The Whole Harmonium, Paul Mariani The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe Eleven Museums, Eleven Directors, Michael E. Shapiro My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgård Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald The Balloonists, Eula Biss Being Mortal, Atul Gawande Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender Stress Tests, Timothy F. Geithner Van Gogh: A Power Seething, Julian Bell Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo, Nicholas Carlson Girl In a Band, Kim Gordon On Immunity: An Inoculation, Eula Biss My Struggle, Book One: Karl Ove Knausgård Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, Eula Biss What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund Inferno (The Divine Comedy, #1), Dante Alighieri (Mary Jo Bang, Translator) Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips , by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal , by Christopher Hitchens , by Christian Patterson
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My Spotify’s a shared-with-kids mess, and for loads of weekly hours I stream jazz and classical music that I don’t make a note of to be recalled. That said, I did especially enjoy new records from Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy, Lomelda, Bob Dylan, Run the Jewels, and Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist. I’m grateful to have been turned on to the music of Big Thief, Harold Budd (via the e-newsletter ), Eleanor Bindman, and Haley Heynderickx, whose always brightened our family’s quarantine, with the kids screaming and jumping along to the swelling refrain, “I need to start a garden!” Here’s to what’s to come. Hours and hours of daily Spotify listening again this year. A few new-to-me artists I enjoyed: Lomelda, Florist, Big Thief, Father John Misty, Better Oblivion Community Center, Julia Holter, Clifford Brown, Red Garland.
Beyond the many hours of classical music I listened to at work through the headphones, the the albums I most enjoyed this year were (nearly a daily listen for me), as well as new/newish records from Julien Baker, Boygenius, Jeff Tweedy, Pusha T, Earl Sweatshirt, Cat Power, Damien Jurado and Lomelda, whose song “From Here” in a way that always makes me smile and sing along. I'm going to skip making a long list of favorite albums and podcasts, and instead note a discovery in each, respectively: (watch her), and . They each feel a bit haunted, and they share, in parts, a gothic sensibility. (Also: I can't not mention Black Thought's instantly classic , which c'mon.) One of the things I like most about being a Spotify subscriber and daily listener is being able to quickly tune into new artists — whether I read about them or they’re served up via the app’s “Discover” tab. New-to-me folks I enjoyed this year include Eskimeaux, Father John Misty/J. Tilman, Florist, J. Cole, Laura Gibson, Alina Ibragimova, My Bubba, Agnes Obel, Angel Olsen, Andy Shauf, and Sun Kil Moon. Among the artists I’ve long loved, I couldn’t get enough of Radiohead’s beautiful 2016 record, “A Moon-Shaped Pool.”
I used to make long lists of specific albums purchased and enjoyed, but since I’ve gone to paid streaming (and, maybe, since I’ve become a committed podcast listener), it’s harder for me to point to specific recordings at a year’s end. This is especially the case since Rdio shut down, and I’m now starting fresh with Spotify — my digital records are kind of a mess. While I listen to hours of classical and ambient/lush music through the headphones during work, a few specific artists I spent more time with in 2015 include Angel Olsen, Youth Lagoon, Sun Kil Moon, Sharon Van Etten, My Bubba, Jennifer O’Connor, Girlpool, Atlas Sound, Earl Sweatshirt, J Cole, Common, Pusha T, A$AP Rocky, Villagers, Natalie Prass, and Perfume Genius.
