Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows. Solnit is a marvelous thinker and historian who moves smoothly between well-researched historical fact and philosophical reverie. Here she traces the life of Edward Muybridge whose motion studies of animals are still familiar today. Muybridge was a first-class photographer, a true artist who also made many technical innovations. Solnit takes his collaboration with Leland Stanford as the jumping-off point for an exploration of the way technology has annihilated time and space, and develops a genealogy from those two to the California of today, dominated by Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In her telling, these two industries named for physical places are at the center of a world that, in large part because of their doing, is increasingly disconnected from the world itself.

Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever. A few years back I made a note to myself to read this novel. I can’t recall why, or at whose urging, but I’m glad I did. Told in over 500 short fragments, Robison is funny and poignant. I was sad to have finished this book.

Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, but I am, so far, disappointed. GDP is the single measure that people associate with economic health and growth, to the extent that people say “the economy grew” when they mean “GDP grew”. How the economy is measured could not be more important and Coyle lays out some of the history of how GDP developed, and some of the ways in which it is flawed. This wasn’t the right level of depth for me — took some things for granted and was disappointingly shallow elsewhere — but seems like a good starting point for a deeper read into these ideas.