Book recommendations
I get asked for book recommendations a lot, so to save everyone time, here’s a big list of stuff that I think is interesting to read.
- Hamming, The art of doing science and engineering
- Williams, Style: Toward clarity and grace
- McCloud, Understanding comics
- Pound, ABCs of reading
- Brand, How buildings learn
- Stravinsky, Six lectures on the poetics of music
- Vachss, Another chance to get it right
- Le Guin, A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be
- Cook, Mathematicians
- Miller, Meditations on violence
- Miller, Drills: Training for sudden Violence
- Deming, Out of the crisis
- Goss, The last word on power
- Allen, Getting things done for teens
- Slywotzky, The art of profitability
- Machiavelli (Tim Parks, translator), The prince
- Howe, Leadership and training for the fight
- Marquet, Turn the ship around
- Scheidel, Escape from Rome
- Bly, A little book on the human shadow
- Lao Tse (Mair, translator), The tao te ching
- Wittgenstein, Philosphical investigations
- Newport, So good they can’t ignore you
- Newport, Deep work
- Sokolowski, Introduction to phenomenology
- Epstein, Range
- Tukey, Exploratory data analysis
- Gel’fand, Algebra; Trigonometry; Functions and their graphs; Method of coordinates
- Chalker-Scott, How plants work
- Bowman, Move your DNA
- Fabian, Data oriented design
- Brodie, Thinking Forth
- Ullman, Elements of ML Programming
- Ross Anderson, Security engineering
- Tom de Marco, The deadline
- Dietrich, Developer hegemony
- Bossavit, The leprechauns of software engineering
- Stevens, TCP/IP illustrated, volume 1
- Kenneth Clarke, Civilization
Fiction and Poetry
- Modesitt, Gravity dreams
- Shaun Tan, The arrival
- Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- Austen, Persuasion
- Homer (Fitzgerald, translator), The odyssey
- Dante (Clive James, translator), The divine comedy
- Pratchett, the Discworld series
- Ford, Parade’s end
- Frost, The complete poems of Robert Frost
- Sabatini, Bellarion
- Ovid (Guy Lee, translator), Ovid in love
- Henderson, Ingathering
- Heinlein, Time enough for love
- Bulgakov, Master and margarita
- Christpher Moore, Fool
- Fitzgerald, The rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
- Hafiz (Daniel Ladinsky, translator), The gift
- Keillor, Good poems
- Bujold, Vorkosigan saga, The curse of Chalion, the Penric stories
- Pyle, Men of iron
- Le Guin, The lost and the found
- Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and sequels
- Pournelle, West of honor; The mercenary; Sparta trilogy
- Kipling, ‘William the Conqueror’
- Backman, A man called Ove
- Nathan Lowell, South coast; Solar Clipper books
- Briggs, Alpha & Omega series
- Herbert, Dune and sequels
- Towles, A gentleman in Moscow
With reservations
These are books that I have recommended, and I still think have valuable material, but they need to be considered for what you can extract from them. Default to questioning what’s in them.
- Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
- Covey, 4 disciplines of execution
- Patterson, Crucial conversations