A working library is an exploration of—and advocate for—All books
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Bird by Bird
Anne Lamott
Personal musings on the life of the writer. Lamott is primarily a novelist, but I find her writing advice to be just as relevant to nonfiction. As with the best books on writing, she expertly dispels any notion of romance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Days of Reading
Marcel Proust
Proust’s meditations on reading, and the gifts that writers leave their readers. Best read slowly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
