books from a working library

All books

Sort by date
Sort by author
Sort by title

Collections

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky

In this follow-up to Here Comes Everybody, Shirky argues that we’re evolving from passive consumers of Seinfeld to creative makers of everything from lolcats to open source software to real-time news reporting. One can’t help but hope that the death of television is as nigh as he predicts. more

Made by Hand

Mark Frauenfelder

A chronicle of one man’s attempt to become a DIYer. Frauenfelder learns that making things yourself means mostly making mistakes, but those mistakes can be a source of joy. He also charmingly demonstrates the old adage that the best way to learn is to get in way over your head. more

The Big Short

Michael Lewis

Infuriatingly good. There isn’t another writer alive who could take the obscurities of subprime mortgages and credit default swaps and deliver a page-turner like this one. Lewis’ storytelling abilities come at a price, however: I now fully understand the extent to which Wall Street is completely and unforgivably fucked. more

The Design of Design

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

An engineer’s perspective on the design process. His conclusions are familiar, but the means by which he gets there are fascinating; something of a mathematical approach to design intuition emerges. more

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Alain de Botton

A lengthy and wonderful photo essay with stories of various kinds of work, from biscuit manufacturer to rocket scientist; a welcome companion to Theriault’s How to Tell When You’re Tired. Alas, de Botton finds many more sorrows than pleasures in the modern workplace. more

Design and Truth

Robert Grudin

A wide-ranging and philosophical approach to user-centered design. Grudin argues compellingly that design that does not consider the user is dishonest. See also: my review in the Barnes&Noble Review. more

HTML5 for Web Designers

Jeremy Keith

The inaugural book from A Book Apart, the new publisher for which I am co-founder and editor. When Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and I decided to launch a small press for people who make websites, there was no topic more important than HTML5, and no one better suited to write about it than Jeremy Keith. Required reading for web designers everywhere. more

Rework

David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Fried

On making work better, from the founders of 37Signals. If you’ve been reading Signals vs. Noise, there’s not much new here. But the combination of short, well-written chapters, large type, and clever illustrations make for a charming and persuasive read. more

The Riverside Shakespeare

Shakespeare

The book I most dreaded carrying around when I was a student (because of its heft), but which I now profess the most nostalgia for. It’s not so much a collection of plays and sonnets as it is a record of days past. more

The Form of the Book

Jan Tschichold

A collection of essays written between 1949 and 1974, the year of Tschichold’s death. Many describe archaic elements of book design, but as a whole the text is as relevant to design today as it was a half century ago. more

You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier

Lanier’s manifesto brings attention to the many ways in which human behavior is being mechanized by technology. One point stands out: that the internet as it is today is not biologically determined, but a result of decisions people made in the recent past. We needn’t accept it as it is; it is within our power to make it better. more

Days of Reading

Marcel Proust

Proust’s meditations on reading, and the gifts that writers leave their readers. Best read slowly. more

Food Rules

Michael Pollan

This little book from everyone’s favorite omnivore deftly defines a series of simple rules to eat by, expanding on his mantra from In Defense of Food: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. more

The Value of Nothing

Raj Patel

Raj Patel carefully demonstrates how traditional economics fails to properly account for many costs (whether environmental or social) and argues that the tragedy of the commons is one borne of privatization and corporatism, not an innate fact of the commoners themselves. more

My Bread

Jim Lahey, Rick Flaste

Lahey’s simple method for bread making (which trades kneading for time) is worth the hype. Once you get a feel for how the dough should come together, it’s foolproof and absolutely delicious. more

Linchpin

Seth Godin

Godin’s newest work argues that what the economy needs are artists—“people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.” These people are linchpins—indispensable people that hold organizations together. A spirited yet pragmatic call to arms for workers everywhere. more

Mediated

Thomas de Zengotita

de Zengotita investigates the ways in which our experience of the world is mediated both through traditional media (television, newspapers) but also the ways in which we self-mediate—whether through photographs or status updates, we’ve come to think of our lives as a narrative, with ourselves always at the center. Written before Twitter came along, but relevant nonetheless. more

Standard Operating Procedure

Errol Morris, Philip Gourevitch

The book companion to Errol Morris’ movie of the same name. Where Morris tells the story with video and photography, Gourevitch communicates with words alone. The effect is less emotional or tactile than the film, but it’s indictment of the war is more strident. more

Library

Matthew Battles

Battles’ lively history runs from the ancients to the internet, with tales of libraries built and burned along the way. In this, one thing becomes clear: that any library, once conceived, will someday be destroyed. more

Summertime

J.M. Coetzee

Of Coetzee’s last few works of fiction (this, Diary of a Bad Year, Elizabeth Costello), I can draw only a few, tentative conclusions: that he feels compelled to explore the structure of the novel itself (for reasons I cannot yet articulate), and that he is wise enough to get out ahead of the biographers who will no doubt pounce on his grave while still warm. more

1 2 3 → Last