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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 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

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

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

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

The Subversive Copy Editor

Carol Fisher Saller

Carol Fisher Saller’s irreverent guide to copy editing has helpful advice for working with writers, as well as guidance for writers about working with their editor. Her expert (and often hilarious) responses to The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A are an excellent reminder that editing is as much art as science. 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

There’s nothing funny about design

David Barringer

A clever (and, yes, funny) collection of essays. Sidebars pepper the text with sources and commentary; the latter often reveal less about the subject matter than the nervous and endearing habits of the writer. more

The Ecocriticism Reader

Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm

An introductory collection in literary ecology, the movement that aims to do for environmentalism what gender and race studies did for civil rights. 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

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Michael Pollan

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

The printing press as an agent of change

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

A long academic work on the history of the advent of printing. The writing is scholarly (read: stuffy), but the subject is fascinating enough to make it worthwhile. more

Unjustified texts

Robin Kinross

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

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

Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday. Perhaps the writer I most admire. more

Ways of Seeing

John Berger

Based on the BBC documentary, Berger begins with a retelling of Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and concludes with a brilliant analysis of modern day advertising and its roots in Renaissance-era oil painting. The text is set in Univers bold, an unusual choice that has the effect of slowing down the reading experience; the result is akin to listening to a voiceover. Two of the book’s seven chapters eschew words in favor of images, and while the quality of the printing leaves a lot to be desired, the essays prevail nonetheless. 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

Why There Are Pages And Why They Must Turn

Robert Bringhurst

A short essay about the future of the book from the inimitable Robert Bringhurst, lovingly typeset in Quadraat and printed on a Heidelberg cylinder press. more

With Borges

Alberto Manguel

A slim volume, with Manguel’s youthful memories of evenings spent reading to Borges in his home in Buenos Aires. more