Another year comes to a close. 
 2016 is probably going to be one of those years that stays around in history books, where the number symbolizes an era or a rapid transition, even though what happened is the culmination of years of broader trends, too vast and impersonal to totally understand even through the perspective of our own lives. 
 I once attempted to read history to gain an objective understanding of the past. But this has changed a great extent. The past is not set. It, too, changes, depending on continuing events, or just by reading a few paragraphs of a book. Certain ideas or interpretations of events reconfigure the past or the structure of the past within my understanding. 
 Books also form a sort of network for me. I'm not really making the effort to look for books as much as I used to, but I dig through citations or references or other people's anthologies, or whatever else I find in here. Just the other day, I was asked for a set of book recommendations, but I found that difficult because I had no idea where to begin with the other person's experiences and what set of ideas they worked with. 
 So. This year in books. Not organized by month, more by categories. 
 Persons, Lives 
 Charlemagne 
 American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant 
 Bush 
 Frederick the Great: King of Prussia 
 Augustine: Conversions to Confessions 
 Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai 
 Incarnations: India in 50 Lives 
 Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon 
 Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition 
 The Ongoing Crises 
 The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War 
 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City 
 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right 
 Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right 
 Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America 
 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis 
 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America 
 Glengarry Glen Ross 
 Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic 
 Notes of a Native Son 
 The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition 
 Politics and Philosophy: And the Twain Shall Never Meet 
 On Tyranny 
 The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
 The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics 
 Philosophy and Real Politics 
 Russia: Beyond History 
 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets 
 The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War 
 Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism 
 Moscow, 1937 
 Beyond Binaries and Norms: LGBT Lives 
 The Argonauts 
 Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation 
 Conundrum 
 The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle 
 Takarazuka: Sexual Politics & Popular Culture in Modern Japan 
 The Price of Salt 
 And of course the 50 or so books I read about China, with the main subtopics being the Cultural Revolution, travels within China, poetry, China's many neighbors, and just dipping my toe into reading into the original. That list is for another day.