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Reading Pictures

Alberto Manguel

Manguel—author of A History of Reading—turns his eye to how we “read” art. A welcome correlative to Berger’s Ways of Seeing. more

Against the Grain

Richard Manning

A revisionist history that argues that we traded away much of our humanity in exchange for the little bit of security that agriculture promised. This book completely changed the way I think about food. more

Man’s Search for Himself

Rollo May

A work of existential psychology—a movement which I make no claims to understanding. But May’s text is intelligent and engaging, with prose as lovely as the insights are profound. Written in the middle of the 20th century, his guidance is no less relevant today. more

The Courage to Create

Rollo May

Deep Economy

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben indicts the current economic system for it’s single-minded pursuit of “more” without regard for whether or not it is (or can be) “better.” The contemporary companion to Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. more

The Comedy of Survival

Joseph Meeker

Meeker argues that the destructive aspects of western civilization are founded on the tragic mode, while the comic mode offers a path for redemption. The foundational work of ecocriticism. more

Boxed In

Mark Crispin Miller

An academic thesis that applies the traditional methods of close reading to television commercials. more

Book Typography

Michael Mitchell, Susan Wightman

A thorough and beautiful guide to typography and typesetting, worthy of any designer’s desk. more

Orality and Literacy

Walter J. Ong

Ong’s is perhaps the only book I’ve discovered that carefully and thoroughly addresses the differences between oral and literate cultures. In pointing out that Plato used writing to deliver his objections to the written word, he says “Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available” (page 79). more

1984

George Orwell

The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual. 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

A Humument

Tom Philiips

The fourth in Tom Philips ongoing project to recompose an old, unknown Victorian novel. The title comes from the original text (A Human Document) after the middle part has been covered up. Philips works through the book, painting, collaging, scribbling over and cutting out parts of the novel to create a new text on top of it. Weird and fascinating and beautiful. more

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Michael Pollan

Worth the hype, not because of the widely-hailed subject matter but because of the extraordinary writing. 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

Days of Reading

Marcel Proust

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

Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely. But despite the challenges, the story is enormously charming; I have very warm feelings about the time I spent with it, and I still think of Byron each time I have to change a bulb. more

Slow Learner

Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon’s early stories are facile at best, but the introduction to the collection—in which Pynchon addresses his readers and talks about his writing—is invaluable. more

Life Inc.

Douglass Rushkoff

A passionate, well-written text that argues that our centralized currency system is the key to the corporatism that has infected not only our government but our daily lives. more

Small Is Beautiful

E.F. Schumacher

Schumacher brilliantly interrogates modern economics, revealing its philosophical underpinnings to be relentless supporters of goods over people. He proposes an alternative—a Buddhist economics—that takes as its imperative the quality of human life, not the quantity of profit. An excellent companion to Rushkoff’s Life Inc. in the argument that economics is not a natural science. more

The Craftsman

Richard Sennett

Sennett defines craftmanship as the desire to do a job well for its own sake. In so doing, he frees it of the bounds of carpentry or metalwork and extends the work of craft to that of the programmer, the doctor, and the parent. And he restores materialism—long maligned as being complicit in capitalism’s ills—as that which looks to “cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves” (page 7). more