BEST THINGS I READ THIS YEAR
Data sourced from my Goodreads and Instapaper accounts. Dates are when the given article or book was read, not when it was published. All books read this year included, articles are a selection from my “liked” list on Instapaper.
JANUARY
The Forever War, Dexter Filkins (5) (NF) (2008)
Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India, Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker
Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?, Pro Publica
The Terror Queue, Casey Newton, Verge
For China’s Pickup Artists, Sex Is the Goal and Urging Suicide Is a Tactic, Li Yuan, New York Times
The Tokyo Job: Inside Carlos Ghosn’s Escape to Beirut, Matthew Campbell, Bloomberg
When a Psychic Reading Costs You $740,000, Sylvia Varnham O’Regan, GQ
A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel, Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian
FEBRUARY
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino (3) (NF) (2019)
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, Joshua Yaffa (4) (NF) (2020)
The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin, Jan Stocklassa (3) (NF) (2018)
The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge, Kera Bolonik, The Cut
The Real Winston Churchill, Richard Seymour, Jacobin
‘Crushed by Brexit’: how Labour lost the election, Heather Stewart, The Guardian
The Itch, Atul Gawande, New Yorker
How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart, Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian
MARCH
Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation Into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, Sam Brower (4) (NF) (2011)
Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff, Anthony McCann (3) (NF) (2019)
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, Camilla Townsend (4) (NF) (2019)
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel (5) (F) (2020)
This Backpack Has It All, Ashley Harman, The Verge
How one man’s epiphany on a Seoul mountain in 1955 laid the foundation for many religious sects in South Korea, Joshua Berlinger, CNN
Defectors Tell of Torture and Forced Sterilization in Militant Iranian Cult, Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
Assimilationists of a Feather, Elliot Friar and Travis LaCouter, The Baffler
Why would someone steal the world’s rarest water lily?, Sam Knight, The Guardian
APRIL
MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman, Ben Hubbard (4) (NF) (2020)
The Feather Thief, Kirk Wallace Johnson (5) (NF) (2018)
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane (3) (NF) (2012)
The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird, Joshua Hammer (3) (NF) (2020)
The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage, Mara Hvistendahl (4) (NF) (2020)
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Mara Hvistendahl (5) (NF) (2011)
The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre Mask (3) (NF) (2020)
A Missionary on Trial, Ariel Levy, The New Yorker
Every Second Matters: The True Story of the White Island Eruption, Alex Perry, Outside
‘I love fame’: how Caroline Calloway survived being cancelled, Elle Hunt, The Guardian
The Big China Short, Eli Binder, The Wire China
MAY
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, Robert Kolker (5) (NF) (2020)
Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire, Jan Morris (5) (NF) (1997)
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, Gretchen McCulloch (3) (NF) (2019)
How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention, Daniel L. Everett (3) (NF) (2017)
A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question, Alexandra Alter, New York Times
JUNE
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Robert Hughes (3) (NF) (1986)
Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy, Alastair Gee (3) (NF) (2020)
Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival, Joe Simpson (4) (NF) (1988)
The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, Patrik Svensson (5) (NF) (2020)
Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating (4) (NF) (2018)
‘Everyone is in that fine line between death and life’: inside Everest’s deadliest queue, Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian
The Leader Who Killed Her City, Timothy McLaughlin, The Atlantic
JULY
One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America, Gene Weingarten (4) (NF) (2019)
The Topeka School, Ben Lerner (3) (F) (2019)
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, Patrick Radden Keefe (5) (NF) (2009)
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, Emma Copley Eisenberg (3) (NF) (2020)
Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, Barbara Demick (4) (NF) (1996)
Valley of Unrest, Sonia Faleiro, Harper’s Magazine
How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands, Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker
The Last Reporter in Town Had One Big Question for His Rich Boss, Dan Barry, New York Times
How Nespresso’s coffee revolution got ground down, Ed Cumming, The Guardian
In Plain Sight, Annie Hylton, Harpers
Death at Delta Sig: Heiress Wages a Million-Dollar War on Frats, John Hechinger, Bloomberg
Hope, Despair, Control: The 1950s China My Father Saw, Echoed Today, Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times
The Looting Network, Jenna Scatena, The Atlantic
AUGUST
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Barbara Demick (5) (NF) (2020)
Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, Ariel Sabar (5) (NF) (2020)
The Golden Thread: The Cold War Mystery Surrounding the Death of Dag Hammarskjöld, Ravi Somaiya (4) (NF) (2020)
This New Zealand city has an official wizard. He even gets paid, Julia Hollingsworth, CNN
The Quest to Unlock an Ancient Library, John Seabrook, New Yorker
The Death of Bon Appétit Is Proof Media Companies Have No Idea What Makes Videos Work, Victoria Song, Gizmodo
A Speck in the Sea, Paul Tough, New York Times
The Publishing Empire Helping China Silence Dissent in Hong Kong, Blake Schmidt, Bloomberg
Why Did These YouTubers Give Away Their Son?, Caitlin Moscatello, The Cut
How Two British Orthodontists Became Celebrities to Incels, William Brennan, New York Times
SEPTEMBER
Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, Alan Rusbridger (3) (NF) (2018)
City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong, Antony Dapiran (5) (NF) (2020)
Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from the Original Epicenter, Fang Fang (4) (NF) (2020)
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, Philip Short (4) (NF) (2004)
The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter, John E. Douglas (4) (NF) (2019)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson (2) (NF) (2019)
Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession, Sarah Weinman (3) (NF) (2020)
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde: And Other True Crime Stories, Mark Bowden (4) (NF) (2020)
The butcher’s shop that lasted 300 years (give or take), Tom Lamont, The Guardian
The Inside Story of the 25-Year, $8 Million Heist From the Carnegie Library, Travis McDade, Smithsonian
How Will Language Change if Humans Travel the Stars?, Sam Kean, Slate
How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda, Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker
How History Gets Rewritten, Timothy McLaughlin, The Atlantic
Buying Myself Back, Emily Ratajkowski, The Cut
How to expose cover-ups in rural China, Yuan Yang, Financial Times
OCTOBER
H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald (4) (NF) (2014)
The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines, Brian Deer (5) (NF) (2020)
Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System That Failed Toronto’s Queer Community, Justin Ling (4) (NF) (2020)
The Hyper-Regional Chippy Traditions of Britain and Ireland, Vittles
The small-town takeout store worker who won over New Zealand — and the world, Julia Hollingsworth, CNN
Wirecard and me: Dan McCrum on exposing a criminal enterprise, Dan McCrum, Financial Times
I called everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book, Leland Nally, Mother Jones
We need a new approach to teaching modern Chinese history: we have lazily repeated false narratives for too long, James Millward, Medium
Inside the Fall of the CDC, Pro Publica
Inside Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin, Josh Dzieza, The Verge
My Saga, Karl Ove Knausgård, New York Times
NOVEMBER
My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgård (5) (F) (2009)
The Curse of the Buried Treasure, Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker
The Great 21st-Century Treasure Hunt, Benjamin Wallace, New York
The Underground Movement Trying to Topple the North Korean Regime, Suki Kim, The New Yorker
DECEMBER
My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgård (4) (F) (2009)
A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (5) (NF) (2020)
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert Caro (5) (NF) (2019)
The mystery of the Gatwick drone, Samira Shackle, The Guardian
Super cubes: inside the (surprisingly) big business of packaged ice, George Reynolds, The Guardian
Marmalade: A Very British Obsession, Olivia Potts, Longreads
FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, Ariel Sabar (5) (NF) (2020)
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Barbara Demick (5) (NF) (2020)
The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines, Brian Deer (5) (NF) (2020)
SOME GOOD THINGS I WROTE
The Mormon church’s century-long mission to crack China
Hong Kong’s vast $3.8 billion rain-tunnel network
Indigenous Australians had their languages taken from them, and it’s still causing issues today
Can a religious group that wants to bring down China’s Communist Party survive in Hong Kong?
James Griffiths 