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 (or late the previous one), and that I read and liked them. Many of the most interesting books I read this year were published years ago; some of the 2024 ones I’ve bought or have been sent remain unread.

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 I think these ones are worth reading.

Here are the lists from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

1. Peter Adey, Evacuation: The Politics and Aesthetics of Movement in Emergency (Duke)
2. Perry Anderson, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War (Verso)
3. Valentina Antoniol, Foucault et la guerre: À partir de Schmitt, contre Schmitt (Mimesis)
4. Maan Barua, Plantation Worlds (Duke)
5. Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years (Pittsburgh) – review forthcoming in Journal of Modern History
6. Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (Verso)
7. Arthur Bradley, Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia)
8. Marta Dyczok, Ukraine not ‘the’ Ukraine (Cambridge)
9. Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, trans. Daniel Bowles (Polity)
10. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, ed. Bernard Harcourt (Seuil/Gallimard/EHESS) and What is Critique? and the Culture of the Self, trans. Clare O’Farrell (Chicago)
11. Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence and our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright)
12. Mary Gilmartin, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin & Sue Roberts (eds.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place, third edition (Sage)
13. Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Hachette)
14. Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault in Brazil: Dictatorship, Resistance, and Solidarity (Pittsburgh) – review in Political Theory
15. Michael Hughes, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life (Open Book – open access)
16. Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought (Verso)
17. Burak Kadercan, Shifting Grounds: The Social Origins of Territorial Conflict (Oxford)
18. Martijn Konings, The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People (Polity)
19. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les plus vastes horizons du monde: Textes et images brésiliens (1935-1942) suivis de cinq films coréalisés avec Dina Dreyfus – eds. Samuel Titan and Carlos Augusto Calil (Éditions Chandeigne)
20. Bruce Lincoln, Secrets, Lies and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder (Oxford)
21. Gail Lythgoe, The Rebirth of Territory (Cambridge) – which I endorsed
22. Oscar Mazzoleni, Territory and Democratic Politics (Palgrave)
23. Eduardo Mendieta, The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (SUNY – open access)
24. Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale)
25. Amín Pérez, Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle, trans. Andrew Brown (Polity)
26. Douglas Porch, Resistance and Liberation: France at War 1942-1945 (Cambridge)
27. Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, eds. James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott (Verso)
28. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (Penguin, reissue)
29. Cristina Vatulescu, Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and their Challenges (Stanford)
30. Owen Ware, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany (Routledge)