I read more books in the year 2020 than in any previous year of my life, and I probably will never top it. This is because in October I took my qualifying exams for my PhD. Some of those books I found boring, many I skimmed, but some changed the way I think profoundly. I also was able to read some fiction. I think of it like dinner stomach and dessert stomach. Surely everyone who used to be a kid knows what this means. After you finish dinner you're full, but you still have room for dessert because of dessert stomach. I've got scholarship brain and novel brain. There's always room left in novel brain.

These are nine books I read last year that changed how I think. Some are classics, some are new, all are worth it.

Holly Buck. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. New York and London: Verso, 2019.

Could geoengineering be necessary? Could it be just?

Garth Greenwell. Cleanness. New York: FSG, 2020.

A Kentuckian on self-imposed exile in Eastern Europe.

Deborah Coen. Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Why should environmental historians care about the Habsburg Empire? Why should historians of east central Europe care about the environment? Both teach us to think between scales.

Ling Ma. Severance. New York: FSG, 2018.

I finished reading this novel about pandemic apocalypse in the first week of March.

Dagmar Herzog. Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Nazis weren't prudes.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Why kitchen gadgets haven't liberated women.

Leora Auslander. Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

A table is never just a table.

Mar Hicks. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.

Why is there no Silicon Valley in Britain? Sexism.

Amitav Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Can fiction cope with climate crisis? It had better.