It seems to be a custom for bloggers, like journalists, to write end-of-the-year pieces. I’ve been writing this for more than a year now, so I figure that’s sufficient to consider it a real thing. I’m going to start, though, with something I haven’t done any writing about, because it’s easy (I can just extract this information from a database query): the books that are new to me in 2014. Some of these books I bought on the basis of reviews, or mentions on Twitter, or (in the case of Andrew Wheeler) explicit non-reviews; others I bought because they were recommended by (or written by!) friends. A few of these books have been sitting on my wishlist for years, waiting for their turn to come around (or go out of stock indefinitely, as sometimes happens before I ever manage to get my hands on a copy). They run the gamut from highly technical books on computing, to popular books on history, linguistics, and law, to books of art, photography, and architecture. There are a lot of cookbooks, because I’m a sucker for food porn (as witness most of the content on this blog). Because I am not a book reviewer, I had to pay for all of these — they didn’t arrive free on my doorstep — and so I don’t feel particularly compelled to attempt to summarize what they are. Despite telling myself to cut back, I regularly acquire far more books than I can ever hope to read, or even find shelf space for.

Here’s the full list (barring any last-minute acquisitions between now and New Year’s):