又到了年末，又是各种年度书单满天飞的季节。从前，我贴过好些年的《经济学家》年度最佳图书（ 因为那时候，部分地出于教书的原因，部分地出于个人兴趣，对该刊几乎每期必读 。有兴趣瞥一眼老黄历的朋友，可以看：2011；2012；2013；2014；2015；2016；2017；2018）。后来，由于年龄增长，一度辗转于某大洋两岸，并且离开了讲台和学校等诸多原因，个人阅读品类也有变化，杂志看得不多了。

尽管各种年末书单的实际用途颇为可疑（除了图书促销等商业目的），喜欢读书或至少喜欢浏览报刊杂志书评版面的人还是不免要浏览一下，看看有没有什么重要的书、可能感兴趣的书被自己错过。以下是《经济学家》和《纽约客》选出的2019年度最佳图书（图书标题链接到 Amazon），希望至少对受阻于付费墙的朋友有点用处。——这两本杂志是我个人最熟悉的英文刊物。至于大西洋两岸最有影响的书评刊物《纽约书评》和《伦敦书评》，反倒没有年度书单，大概是曾经沧海难为水吧。

在人人低头，屏幕主导一切“阅读”的时代，让我们尽量找机会，捧一本纸书，享受一点不受干扰的阅读时光吧。

祝您2020新年快乐！

———

补充：《大西洋》杂志的2019最佳书单

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The Economist

Politics and Current Affairs

• Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. By Chris Arnade. Sentinel; 304 pages.
• An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago. By Alex Kotlowitz. Nan A. Talese; 304 pages
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. By Anand Giridharadas. Knopf; 304 pages.
• No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. By Rachel Louise Snyder. Bloomsbury; 320 pages
• Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria. By Sam Dagher. Little, Brown; 592 pages.
• The Light that Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy. By Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev. Pegasus Books; 256 pages.
• Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today. Edited by James Banner junior. New Press; 512 pages.

History

• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. By Patrick Radden Keefe. Doubleday; 464 pages.
• Remembering Emmett Till. By Dave Tell. University of Chicago Press; 312 pages.
• Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre. By Kim Wagner. Yale University Press; 360 pages.
• Maoism: A Global History. By Julia Lovell. Knopf; 610 pages.
• The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern. By Robert Morrison. W.W. Norton; 416 pages.
• How to be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century. By Frank Dikötter. Bloomsbury; 304 pages.

Biography and Memoir

• An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent. By Owen Matthews. Bloomsbury; 448 pages.
• The Education of an Idealist. By Samantha Power. Dey Street Books; 592 pages.
• Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century. By Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pages.
• The Last Stone. By Mark Bowden. Atlantic Monthly Press; 304 pages.

Economics

• Good Economics for Hard Times. By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. PublicAffairs; 432 pages.
• Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. By Bryan Caplan. Illustrated by Zach Weinersmith. First Second; 256 pages.
• Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. By Robert Shiller. Princeton University Press; 400 pages.
• Schism: China, America, and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System. By Paul Blustein. CIGI Press; 400 pages.
• Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World. By Branko Milanovic. Belknap Press; 304 pages.

Culture and Ideas

• Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. By Casey Cep. Knopf; 336 pages.
• Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy. By Benjamin Balint. W.W. Norton; 288 pages.
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey. By Robert Macfarlane. W.W. Norton; 384 pages.
• Three Women. By Lisa Taddeo. Simon & Schuster; 320 pages.
• A Month in Siena. By Hisham Matar. Random House; 126 pages.
• This is Shakespeare. By Emma Smith. Pelican; 368 pages.

Fiction

• Stalingrad: A Novel. By Vasily Grossman. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. NYRB Classics; 1,088 pages.
• Ducks, Newburyport. By Lucy Ellmann. Biblioasis; 1,040 pages.
• 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. By Elif Shafak. Bloomsbury; 320 pages.
• Homeland. By Fernando Aramburu. Translated by Alfred MacAdam. Pantheon; 608 pages.
• The Volunteer. By Salvatore Scibona. Penguin Press; 432 pages.
• The Far Field. By Madhuri Vijay. Grove Press; 448 pages.
• Trust Exercise. By Susan Choi. Henry Holt; 272 pages.
• Black Sun. By Owen Matthews. Doubleday; 320 pages.

Science and Technology

• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. By David Wallace-Wells. Tim Duggan Books; 320 pages.
• The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder. By Sean McFate. William Morrow; 336 pages.
• Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. By Randolph Nesse. Dutton; 384 pages.
• Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. By James Lovelock with Bryan Appleyard. MIT Press; 160 pages.

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The New Yorker

Nonfiction

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells
• Inside Out: A Memoir, by Demi Moore
• How I Became One of the Invisible, by David Rattray
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell
• Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, by Hanif Abdurraqib
• A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch, by Sanam Maher
• Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, by John Boughton
• Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch, by Alexandra Jacobs