JPH Reading List

2023

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Stay True - Hua Hsu

The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. LeGuin

Loon Lake - E.L. Doctorow

The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber & David Wengrow

Mothman Apologia - Robert Warren Lynn

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States - James C. Scott

The Journals of Lewis and Clark - Edited by Bernard DeVoto

Run Toward the Danger - Sarah Polley

The Farthest Shore - Ursula K. LeGuin

Assembling a Black Counter Culture - DeForrest Brown Jr. 

Bonsai - Alejandro Zambra

Ascension - Nicholas Binge

The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood

The Art of Flight  - Sergio Pitol

The Counselor - Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris - Cormac McCarthy

Artificial Hells - Claire Bishop

Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel

Time’s Up, Living Colour 33 1/3 series - Kimberly Mack

The Lights - Ben Lerner

Freedom in the Wilds: An Artist in the Adirondacks - Harold Weston edited by Rebecca Yates

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - Walker Evans & James Agee

Delirious New York - Rem Koolhas


2022

Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins Amelia Groom
So Much For That Winter Dorthe Nors
Common Tones Alan Licht
Nog Rudy Wurlitzer
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons John Wesley Powell
The Clearing JJJJJerome Ellis
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 Taylor Branch
Meet Me in the Bathroom Lizzy Goodman
Marquee Moon Bryan Waterman
Authority and Freedom: In Defense of the Arts Jed Perl
American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life. Richard K. Rein
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex John Miller
Dune Frank Herbert
Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty Dave Hickey
Hopscotch Julio Cortazar
Vermillion Sands JG Ballard
Countryside, a report Edited by AMO & Rem Koolhaas
The Peripheral William Gibson
Ministry for the Future Kim Stanley Robinson
The Silence Don Delillo
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68 Taylor Branch
Empire Falls Richard Russo
A Wizard of EarthSea Ursula LeGuin


2021

To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown - Stephen B. Oates
The World Without Us - Alan Weisman
Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen - John P. Jacobs / Luke Skrebowski
Sonic Agency - Brandon LaBelle
American Prison - Shane Bauer
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land - Aime Cesaire
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
STRATA. William Smith's Geological Maps - Robert MacFarlane, various
Discipline and Punish - Michael Foucault
Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age - Annalee Newitz
The Essential Poems - Jim Harrison
Things We Lost in the Fire - Mariana Enriquez
Akira (Vol. 1-6) - Katsuhiro Otomo
The Black Jacobins - C.L.R. James
Night Sky with Exit Wound - Ocean Vuong
In the American Grain - William Carlos Williams
Poverty Point: Revealing the Forgotten City - Jenny Ellerbe and Diana M. Greenlee
White Bicycles: making music in the 1960s - Joe Boyd
Francis Bacon: Revelations - Annalynn Swan & Mark Stevens
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 - Taylor Branch
Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
The Shape of the Ruins - Juan Gabriel Vasquez

2020

People I've Met From the Internet - Stephen van Dyck
Arctic Dreams - Barry Lopez
Sonic Flux - Christoph Cox
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life - William Finnegan
Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The City That Never Was - Christopher Marcinkoski
Great Plains Geology - R. F. Diffendal Jr.
The Necessity for Ruins - J. B. Jackson
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G. Ballard
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Cloudsplitter - Russell Banks
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - Manuel De Landa
Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist - Ruth Erickson (editor)
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent - Alexander von Humboldt
U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money) - John Dos Passos
Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell
Nobody's Fool - Richard Russo
Art as Experience - John Dewey
Silver, Sword, & Stone - Marie Araña

2019

How to Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan
You Were Never Really Here - Jonathan Ames
Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
High Windows - Philip Larkin
Dewey for Artists - Mary Jane Jacobs
Life on Mars - Tracy K. Smith
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
The River - Peter Heller
Cahokia - Timothy R. Pauketat
Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
London Orbital - Iain Sinclair
The Other Paris - Luc Sante
Manahatta - Eric Sanderson
Into the Raging Sea - Rachel Slade
You are Not Alone: Susan Phillipsz - Susan Phillipsz
Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiu
Ancient Mexico - Maria Longhena
Jungle of Stone - William Carlsen

2018

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis
Scenes in America Deserta - Reyner Banham
October - China Mieville
Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Ilosa
New York 2140 - Kim Stanley Robinson
High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the fate of American Public Housing - Ben Austen
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann
The Burning Room - Michael Connelly
Maddaddam - Margaret Atwood
Hello America - J.G. Ballard
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu
Music After the Fall - Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Wilderness and the American Mind - Roderick Frazier Nash
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World - Andrea Wulf
The Power - Naomi Alderman

2017

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
The Dry - Jane Harper
Robert Ashley - Kyle Gann
Nutshell - Ian McEwan
Genesis of a Music - Harry Partch
Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
Shadowbahn - Steve Erickson
Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson
The Island at the Center of the World - Russell Shorto
Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The History of Forgetting - Norman Klein
Patterson - William Carlos Williams
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth 
Walking the Kiso Road - William Scott Wilson

2016

Music 109 - Alvin Lucier
The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins
Berlin Noir - Philip Kerr
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Max Neuhaus Times Square Time Piece Beacon - various / Dia Foundation
Quicksand - Robert Ashley
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings - edited by Jack Flam
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music - George Lewis
The Bridge - Gay Talese
The Whites - Richard Price
Eviction - Matthew Desmond
The Stench of Honolulu - Jack Handey
Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History - Jennifer L. Roberts
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin
Brown Dog - Jim Harrison
After Sound - G. Douglas Barrett
number9dream - David Mitchell
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle - Stephen Jay Gould
The Crystal World - J.G. Ballard
The Myth of Eternal Return - Mircea Eliade
Empty Words - John Cage
Best. State. Ever.  - Dave Barry

2015

Noise Water Meat  - Douglas Kahn
Noise  - Jacques Attali
Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
Beyond the Dream Syndicate - Branden Joseph
Authority - Jeff VanderMeer
Words Without Music - Phillip Glass
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Selected Poems - W.H. Auden
Slade House - David Mitchell
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Records Ruin the Landscape - David Grubbs
Annals of the Former World - John McPhee

2014

Zone One - Colson Whitehead
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles and the '60s - Ian MacDonald
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
Fountains of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke
The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino
Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
Look at Me - Jennifer Egan
2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson
Heliopolis - James Scudamore
The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell
In the Blink of an Ear - Seth Kim-Cohen

2013

Walden and Civil Disobedience - Henry Thoreau
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Faust, Part 1 - Johann von Goethe
Punk Rock Dad - Jim Lindberg
Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
Turing's Cathedral - George Dyson
Red Shift - Alan Garner
Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke
The Place Where You Go to Listen - John Luther Adams
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
The Drought - J.G. Ballard
Blood Music - Greg Bear

2012

Guns, Germs & Steel - Jared Diamond
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman
A Canticle for Liebowitz - Walter Miller Jr. 
Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley
Wings of the Dove - Henry James
Great Plains - Ian Frazier
Blood's a Rover - James Ellroy
Collapse - Jared Diamond
Travels with Charley: In Search of America - John Steinbeck