At the end of each year I’ve posted a list of academic books I liked. The criteria was that they were published in that year, and that I read and liked them. This means that good books which came out this year but which I didn’t read immediately don’t feature, and I will of course miss many. In the middle of the year, when I was unwell, I went for a while without reading anything work-related.

Some of those featured are books I reviewed or endorsed, and others are by friends and colleagues. Certain publishers, especially those I review for, feature disproportionately. It’s of course biased by my interests and prejudices. So while there are doubtless many other good books from each of these years, I can at least say that these are all worth reading.

Here are the lists from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.

My favourite academic books of 2023 are:

1. Kostas Axelos, The Game of the World, trans. Justin Clemens and Hellmut Munz  (Edinburgh) – which I endorsed
2. Georges Bataille, The Limit of the Useful, trans. and ed. Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott (MIT) and Critical Essays Volume I: 1944-1948, ed. Alberto Toscano and Benjamin Noys, trans. Chris Turner (Seagull)
3. Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I: Violence, Spectacle and Data (Routledge)
4. Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Elias Canetti and Social Theory (Bloomsbury)
5. Italo Calvino, The Written World and the Unwritten World: Collected Non-Fiction, trans. Ann Goldstein (Penguin)
6. Noel Castree, Greig Charnock, Brett Christophers, David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (Routledge)
7. Irene Cheng, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Minnesota)
8. Karen Culcasi, Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan (Chicago) – which I endorsed
9. Danny Dorling, Shattered Nation: Inequality ad the Geography of a Failing State (Verso)
10. Michel Foucault, Le Discours philosophique, edited by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera (Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS) and the translations of Madness, Language, Literature (Chicago)  and The Japan Lectures (Routledge)
11. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke)
12. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso)
13. Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (Harvard/Allen Lane)
14. Ian Klinke, Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel’s Necropolitical Geography (Michigan)
15. Natalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso)
16. Shiloh Krupar, Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers (Minnesota Forerunners)
17. Daniele Lorenzini, The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault (Chicago)
18. Jared D. Margulies, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade (Minnesota)
19. Ian Merkel, Terms of Exchange: Brazilian Intellectuals and the French Social Sciences (Chicago)
20. Sara Safransky, The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit (Duke)
21. Tim Simpson, Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution (Minnesota)
22. Martina Tazzioli, Border Abolitionism: Migrants’ Containment and the Genealogies of Struggle and Rescue (Manchester)
23. Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China (Penguin)
24. James Tyner, Academic Writing for Geographers: A Handbook (De Gruyter)
25. Karine Varley, Vichy’s Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War  (Cambridge)
26. Joseph Vogl, Capital and Ressentiment: A Short Theory of the Present, translated by Neil Solomon (Polity)
27. Françoise Waquet, Latin: Or, the Empire of a Sign, trans. John Howe (Verso reissue)
28. Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale)
29. Jeffrey Whyte, The Birth of Psychological Warfare: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford/British Academy; open access) – which I endorsed
30. Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice – University of Nebraska Press (sequel to Franz Boas, The Emergence of the Anthropologist, 2019)

I’ve just started Ash Amin, After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance (Polity). Valentina Antoniol, Foucault et la guerre: À partir de Schmitt, contre Schmitt (Mimésis) arrived late in the year and I hope to have time for it soon.