I read 52 books last year. I was initially a bit disappointed by this (I'd been aiming for something like 75), but then realised: hey! I read 52 books! Many of them great!
I've been stalled and slow a bit since late last year. I'm currently on the Felix Castor urban fantasy series (which is a fast read when I actually get my head into that mode) and The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson, which is a great read on the history of, yes, the shipping container.
(Looks like I mentioned this back in The Box and Ox, which shows you how long I've been reading this one...)
The Box is a great read that provides some pretty foundational context for the modern economy. There's a real nexus of unlikely forces that turned things into their final form. It does also have a particular narrative, which feels very Silicon Valley in a modern context, around how much sclerotic ways of doing things were ripe for disruption as soon as someone managed to start pulling the pieces together.
It's not really a history of technological innovation. There was nothing inherently new, technologically speaking, about the shipping container. The idea had been talked about long before it eventuated, and there were extant analogues like the military CONEX containers already in use. The book is, really, about labour rights and activism, economic forces, and geopolitics. These were all critical in the creation of containerised shipping and the somewhat turbulent emergence of it into a standardised global routing system.