Top Ten Books of 2016

These books are, to my way of thinking, the most relevant to my work and were published in the last year (from November 2015 onward)

1 Harcourt, Bernard E. 2015. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Harcourt's book is absolutely essential for anyone interested in or researching the effects of surveillance and metadata collection on society.

2 Ray, Arthur J.  2016. Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Ray looks at Indigenous law and legislation with examples from around the world.

3 Flanery, Patrick. 2016. I Am No One. London: Atlantic.

Flanery's novel of surveillance pushes the limits of a genre in the tradition of Orwell, Kafka, and Mukherjee.

4 Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press.

Taylor's work has always resonated for me, and inspired ideas about how to write well philosophically.  Philosophy of language is remarkably relevant to counter-mapping as well.

5 Fenge, Terry and Aldrige, Jim. (eds.). 2015. Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.

This edited collection is timely, covering what J.R. Miller called "the single most important document in the history of treaty making in Canada."

6 Milner, Greg. 2016. Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Our World. London: Granta.

Milner's work of popular science explains GPS with narrative aplomb and scientific rigour.

7 Elkin, Lauren. 2016. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. London: Chatto & Windus.

Elkin looks at how we must feminize the ideas of flanerie, psychogeography, and wandering opening a critique of the male-gendered gaze in the field.

8 Pomerantz, Jeffrey. 2015. Metadata. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

What is metadata? Concept and application are explained here both broadly, and in depth.

9 Waldrop, Rosemarie. 2016. Gap Gardening: Selected Poems. New York: New Directions.

A wonderful overview of Waldrop's life-work including a lot of prose poetry and 'spatial' poetry.

10 Devine, T.M. 2016. Independence or Union? Scotland's Past and Scotland's Present. New York and London: Penguin.

Another history of Scotland from the master, with new insight post-referendum (x2).