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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

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

How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul

Adrian Shaughnessy

Graphic Design

Adrian Shaughnessy

Shaugnessy’s irreverent guide—the ABC’s of design—addresses the underside of the designer’s life, with entries on banks (page 30), presentation skills (page 230), and sacking clients (page 268). Each post is short and discreet, making for a book that need not be read in the order it was made. Much to my surprise, the monospaced text font is entirely comfortable to read. more

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky

I’m late to the party on this, but Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody discusses the evolution of group collaboration in the age of social media, and, conversely, the increasing irrelevance of institutions. Required reading for anyone who thinks about the ways in which technology is changing human behavior. more

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

Nudge

Cass R. Sunstein, Richard H. Thaler

A compelling little book arguing for “libertarian paternalism,” a doctrine that nudges people towards the decisions most likely to improve their lives, while maintaining their freedom to do as they choose. Most interesting for their discussions of “choice architecture,” which describes how we create the conditions under which people make choices, with obvious parallels to usability design. more

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Tharp’s treatise on creativity applies as well to writing or design as it does to dance. more

How to Tell When You’re Tired

Reg Theriault

A fabulous little book, written by a lifelong worker. Theriault came from a family of fruit tramps—migrant workers who travelled the country picking fruit wherever it came to harvest—and later became a longshoreman. His insight into the working life is profound and lovely—as relevant to those on the docks as to those at their desks. 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

While You’re Reading

Gerard Unger

Directed at the layman instead of the serious typographer, Unger’s book is a breezy overview of the science of reading. more

The Art of Simple Food

Alice Waters

A beautifully designed book that has served me well in the kitchen. Especially helpful when you belong to a CSA and need to decide what to do with the week’s pound of turnips. Waters also includes helpful notes about stocking your pantry and what equipment to buy (or not buy, as the case may be). more

Limbo

Bernard Wolfe

A bizarre dystopia in which the elite voluntarily amputate their limbs and have them replaced with high performing machines. Deeply misogynistic. more

Proust and the Squid

Maryanne Wolf

Wolf addresses the ways in which the brain adapts—or fails to adapt—to reading. An excellent history, as well as a compelling glimpse at the ways in which reading on the screen may yet create a new kind of literacy. more