Though the Becker was given to me by a sociologist friend of mine, I’d first heard about it in Gary Greenberg’s vastly underappreciated Manufacturing Depression. The other best book I read this year was a manuscript copy of Greenberg’s follow-up, the forthcoming Untitled, Utterly Riveting Book about the Lunatic Development of the DSM-V. (Maybe it has a title by now? That’s what I would have called it.)
Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s Year in Reading.