The Reading List
A start at a list of books and authors I’ve liked. Right now it’s no particular order. I’ll probably categorize it one of these days.
- “Lean on Pete” by Willy Vaultin. One of the reviewers said it’s Huck Finn for the crystal meth generation. Wish I’d said that. Very dark, but one of the most well-written books I’ve read in a long time.
- Mark Bittman. “Food Matters.” Makes the point Michael Poulan was trying to make in “The Omnivores Dilemma” with considerably less tedium.
- Anthony Bourdain. “Les Halles Cookbook.” Worth reading for Bourdain’s comments, even if you’re not interested in bistro cooking.
- Ken Kesey. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, and “Sometimes a Great Notion.” Cuckoo’s Nest is a masterpiece, you need to read it.
- Clifford Stoll. “The Cuckoo’s Egg” and “Silicon Snake Oil.” You’ll wish you too were a hippy and lived in Berkeley. It’s hard to figure how a book about hackers and a book about the hazards of the Internet culture can be such happy, gentle tales, but they are.
- Speaking of hippies on the left coast, “Farm City” by Novella Carpenter is an interesting story of urban farming in Oakland.
- Anne Tyler. Any of her books.
- James Lee Burke. Any of his books prior to 2005 or so. His early Dave Robicheaux novels are lyrical and mystical. The later ones just seem pointlessly violent.
- Robert Parker. Any of the Spenser series. Although the later ones get a bit formulaic, they’re all a good read.
- William Gibson. Start with “Neuromancer” and go from there. When you read Neuromancer remember it was written before the Internet came into being.
- Anything by Douglas Hofstadter. If you ever get all puffed up about your intellectual prowess, “Godel, Escher, and Bach” will make it painfully obvious that Hofstadter is so far out on the right edge of the intellectual bell curve that you can’t even see him.
- Donald Norman. “The Design of Everyday Things.” If you have anything to do with building things people use you must read this book. Even if you don’t you should read it. You’ll never look at a doorknob the same way again after reading it.
- Tom deMarco. “Slack” and “Peopleware”. A bit utopian perhaps, but as you read them you’ll wonder why a workplace can’t be like he describes.
- Douglas Coupland. Anything he writes is worth your time to read. “Microserfs” is a particularly good tale that will make you wish you too were a geeky programmer.
- David Sedaris. If you’re easily offended, stay away. His story, “All the Beauty You Will Ever Need” in the book “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” is the funniest thing I have ever read. It’s impossible to explain, because any passage you might pick out of it is so offensive out of context that you can’t do it.
rob was working through godel, escher and bach when he died, wish I could have asked him if he agreed with you.
Your list has ruined my summer mindless “beach read” plans. Now I have to think.