Colin Marshall

The Guardian rounds up its city writers’ favorite city books of 2014, including my selection:

The Interior Circuit
Francisco Goldman

It takes bravery, or at least fatalism, to drive in Mexico City. Having developed a bit of both in the years after his young wife’s sudden death, Guatemalan-American writer Francisco Goldman took on the challenge of learning to navigate his adopted hometown by car as a way of extracting himself from the self-destructive lifestyle into which the tragedy plunged him. The Interior Circuit tells of not just his struggle for self- and urban mastery, but of the city’s own – against its political corruption, its student unrest, its stark class divisions and its popular image as a crime-racked, death-obsessed, “surreal” sort of metropolis.

The others’ picks include books on Shanghai “vernacular neighborhoods” and “urban smellscapes” as well as Pico Iyer’s latest.