Another year gone and more books in the, well, book! My list of 2016 reads sparked some conversation with people in my life and finally convinced me to get on Goodreads, so I wanted to share this year’s list, too. The lists are in alphabetical order by title and grouped into nonfiction and fiction categories.
Nonfiction
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert Sapolsky
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Steven Pinker
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Blended: Using Disruptive Education to Improve Schools
Michael Horn and Heather Staker
Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life
Dacher Keltner
Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education
Nel Noddings
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
Thomas Ligotti
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Courage to Be
Paul Tillich
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education
Martha Nussbaum
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education
John Dewey
Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life
Susan David
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Chris Hedges
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability
Todd May
Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society
Thich Nhat Hanh
The Hero Handbook
Nate Green
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
Margot Lee Shetterly
A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari
How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place
Bjørn Lomborg
The Importance of What We Care About
Henry Frankfurt
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Max Tegmark
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tails
Oliver Sacks
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
Richard Thaler
Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
George Lakoff
Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
Joshua Greene
Moving Toward Global Compassion
Paul Ekman
On Dialogue
David Bohm
On Tyranny: Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Timothy Snyder
One Student at a Time: Leading the Global Education Movement
Fernando Reimers
Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought
George Lakoff
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
Francis Fukuyama
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
edited by Christopher Hitchens
Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs
Henry Carroll
Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Joseph Aoun
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction
Mark Lilla
Simone Weil: An Anthology
Simone Weil
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Chogyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Cathy O’Neil
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami
What’s Worth Teaching?: Rethinking Curriculum in the Age of Technology
Allan Collins
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Nancy Isenberg
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
Robert Wright
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Alan Watts
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Kory Stamper
World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students
Yong Zhao
Fiction
2 B R 0 2 B – Kurt Vonnegut
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
Last Night in Twisted River – John Irving
Men Without Women – Haruki Murakami
The Nun’s Story – Kathryn Hulme
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Three Muskateers – Alexandre Dumas
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
As the year turns over, I wish you a 2018 full of peace, joy, and good books. Happy reading!
By Rebecca Michelle 
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