sshhh! This is a working library.

The Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein

Klein expertly and devastatingly reveals the history behind a model of capitalism that first fed on disaster, then fomented it. (I tossed the jacket, on account of it being unbearably ugly.) 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

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

The Vintage Book of Amnesia

Jonathan Lethem

An eccentric collection of short pieces that touch on the subject of memory loss, from writers as varied as Martin Amis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Oliver Sacks. 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

A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel

The Library at Night

Alberto Manguel

A series of meandering essays on the subject of the library. more

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