inspired by Venkatesh Rao's Now Reading page. left column is current, right column is lifetime.
last updated: july 3, 2025.
now reading
- Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez
- Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti
- Essayism, Brian Dillon
- Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann
recently finished
- The Peregrine, J. A. Baker
- Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde
- Things Become Other Things, Craig Mod
respectable dent
- The Overstory, Richard Powers
- Code, Charles Petzold (reread but 2nd edition this time)
first chapter (sampling)
- (none at the moment)
maybe next up?
- The Power Broker, Robert Caro
antilibrary (someday)
- Horizons, Barry Lopez
- Swann's Way, Marcel Proust
- The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
north stars
- Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
- The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
- Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
- The Gift, Lewis Hyde
- A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes
- The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
- The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder
favorite novels
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
- Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
- Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
- The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
- My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
- Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
- American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
- This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
favorite nonfiction
- Impro, Keith Johnstone
- A Vindication of Love, Cristina Nehring
- Grass Roots, Paul Gruchow
- Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
- Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur
- Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
- Letters: Summer 1926, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke
frequently mentioned in conversations or writing
- A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
- Proxies, Brian Blanchfield
- Walk Through Walls, Marina Abramović
- In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
- The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
favorite canons
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Michael Lewis
- Elena Ferrante
- Rainer Maria Rilke (letters)
- Flannery O'Connor (short stories)