Well, I had a look at their Top 10, and nothing really caught my eye. There are two book-length expansions of magazine articles I remember reading, one a Mother Jones article about private prisons, and Michael Pollan’s article on psychedelics. Both were good, but the articles were long enough and got the point across. I don’t need to read the books.

They also have a list of “books that didn’t make the top 10“. Steven Pinker has a new one on why things are actually not so bad in the United States right now. Incidentally, you can contrast it with this article about how things are really bad in the United States right now, or at least going in a bad direction when most of the rest of the developed world is making progress. I think it depends on who you are – things are okay if you are a middle-class professional or higher on the class ladder (and you pretty much have to be a professional to live a middle class life style these days, which is the problem – being at the median really does not necessarily mean a middle class life style these days.)

Another one that caught my eye – just in time for Christmas! – is called The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I’ve always sort of thought that even in the Christian world of the Middle Ages was less enlightened than what came before, and arguably less enlightened than the Muslim and East Asian worlds of the time, it at least preserved art, music, and literature that was built on later. The title of this one (which I admit is all I have read) seems to cast doubt on that.