Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Top Ten Books of 2016

These books are, to my way of thinking, the most relevant to my work and were published in the last year (from November 2015 onward)

1 Harcourt, Bernard E. 2015. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Harcourt's book is absolutely essential for anyone interested in or researching the effects of surveillance and metadata collection on society.

2 Ray, Arthur J.  2016. Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Ray looks at Indigenous law and legislation with examples from around the world.

3 Flanery, Patrick. 2016. I Am No One. London: Atlantic.

Flanery's novel of surveillance pushes the limits of a genre in the tradition of Orwell, Kafka, and Mukherjee.

4 Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press.

Taylor's work has always resonated for me, and inspired ideas about how to write well philosophically.  Philosophy of language is remarkably relevant to counter-mapping as well.

5 Fenge, Terry and Aldrige, Jim. (eds.). 2015. Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.

This edited collection is timely, covering what J.R. Miller called "the single most important document in the history of treaty making in Canada."

6 Milner, Greg. 2016. Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Our World. London: Granta.

Milner's work of popular science explains GPS with narrative aplomb and scientific rigour.

7 Elkin, Lauren. 2016. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. London: Chatto & Windus.

Elkin looks at how we must feminize the ideas of flanerie, psychogeography, and wandering opening a critique of the male-gendered gaze in the field.

8 Pomerantz, Jeffrey. 2015. Metadata. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

What is metadata? Concept and application are explained here both broadly, and in depth.

9 Waldrop, Rosemarie. 2016. Gap Gardening: Selected Poems. New York: New Directions.

A wonderful overview of Waldrop's life-work including a lot of prose poetry and 'spatial' poetry.

10 Devine, T.M. 2016. Independence or Union? Scotland's Past and Scotland's Present. New York and London: Penguin.

Another history of Scotland from the master, with new insight post-referendum (x2).