What I Read This Year

And some housekeeping

First, I want to thank all of you for subscribing to Nuclear Barbarians. I feel like this last year I put out some of my best podcasts—it would be impossible to carry out this work without your support. And pointless. I remain gratefully in your debt. I already have some episodes in the can that I think you’re going to like.

Second, if you haven’t already, check out my daily energy newsletter, Grid Brief. We keep an eye on generation on the American grid, global energy politics, domestic issues, industry reports, and much more. We have also launched a Premium Tier—which offers the Monday look at international issues and the Friday Deep Dive into various parts of the American energy system. We’re also working on unrolling Q&As with energy industry movers and shakers. For premium subscribers, I recently wrote about spat between the PJM grid operator, a coal plant owner, and the Sierra Club. It’s a little covered story that tells us a lot about what’s going wrong on the American grid. You can subscribe to Grid Brief Premium here.

Lastly, here is a list of all that I read this year. I wrote some recommendations for the Claremont Review of Books, but I wanted to publish the list in full here. For me, it was an incredibly intellectually productive year thanks to many of these titles. Happy New Year!

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The Gododdin - Aneirin (trans. Gillian Clarke)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson 

The Laws - Plato (trans. Thomas L. Pangle)

Chicago: City on the Make - Nelson Algren

The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama

Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud

California Burning: The Fall of PG&E and What It Means for America’s Power Grid - Katherine Blunt

Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon - William D. Cohan

The Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 - Jackson Lears

The Genealogy of Morality - Nietzsche 

Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image - Christopher P. Heuer

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place - Harry Crews

His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation - Diana Schaub 

Regime Change: Toward a Post-Liberal Order - Patrick Deneen

The “Death of the Subject” Explained - James Heartfield

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy

The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900 - Jon K Lauck

The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It - Angelo Codevilla

Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion - Joshua Porter

TVA and the Power Fight, 1933-1939 - Thomas McGraw 

Uzumaki - Junji Ito

Leaves of Grass (1855 manuscript) - Walt Whitman

David E. Lilienthal: The Journey of an American Liberal - Steven M. Neuse

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism - Fred Turner 

Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism - Andrew G. Kirk

Guinea Pig B: A 56 Year Experiment - Buckminster Fuller

Powerlined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind - Daniel L. Wuebben

Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

White Buildings - Hart Crane

The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison, and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis - John F. Wasik

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence - Danielle Allen

Prufrock and Other Observations- TS Eliot 

A Sand County Almanac & Sketches Here and There - Aldo Leopold