My bedtime reading in 2016

I didn't get as much bedtime reading in this year as last. And there is also my monthly Harper's habit to contend with. I read Thomas Frank's non-fiction book Listen, Liberal well before the election, a prophetic book in some ways, but then its been building since the early days of the The Baffler.  Heroes of the Frontier and The Harder they Come  look deeply at fictional lives of people enmeshed in this election's America. The essays in The Utopia of Rules shows how complicity with the acknowledgement that rules and criteria over value matter in a meritocracy is the first step in recognizing that they really don't and that power resides in the maintenance of this illusion. Lastly, The Invention of Nature, is a biography of Alexander Von Humbolt and an exposition of how his ideas influenced Darwin, Thoreau, Simon Bolivar, Jefferson, Goethe, and many others. Many ecological and environmental ideas we take as a given now or simply attribute to others were from Humbolt.