inspired by Venkatesh Rao's Now Reading page. left column is current, right column is lifetime.
last updated: november 24, 2023.
note my latest shelves can now be found at catalog!
now reading
- Middlemarch, George Eliot
- Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
- Anna, Amy Odell
- Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950, Patricia Highsmith
- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner
respectable dent
- The Library Book, Susan Orlean
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann
- Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
- Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Malcolm Harris
- This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- Dubliners, James Joyce
- My Meteorite, Harry Dodge
- Code, Charles Petzold (reread but 2nd edition this time)
- Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott
- The Power Broker, Robert Caro
- Die Broke, Stephen M. Pollan
- The New Lombard Street, Perry Mehrling
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming
- The Big Score, Michael S. Malone
- Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So
- Exhalation, Ted Chiang
first chapter
- Analysis Patterns, Martin Fowler
- The Intel Trinity, Michael S. Malone
- Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922, Marina Tsvetaeva
- Ulysses, James Joyce
- Structured Design, Edward Yourdon and Larry L. Constantine
- Minding Mr. Market, James Grant
- Tools for Thought, Howard Rheingold
- Severance, Ling Ma
- The Global Minotaur, Yanis Varoufakis
maybe next up?
- Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon
- A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin
- Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde
recently finished
- Life in Code, Ellen Ullman
- Tidy First?, Kent Beck
- The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
- Going Infinite, Michael Lewis
antilibrary (someday)
- Swann's Way, Marcel Proust
- The Overstory, Richard Powers
- Selected Essays, John Berger
- The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
north stars
- Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle
- Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
- The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
- A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes
- The Gift, Lewis Hyde
- The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
- The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder
favorites / most frequently recommended
- Letters: Summer 1926, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke
- A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
- Impro, Keith Johnstone
- A Vindication of Love, Cristina Nehring
- Grass Roots, Paul Gruchow
- Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
- 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
- Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur
frequently mentioned in conversations or writing
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
- Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Proxies, Brian Blanchfield
- The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean
- Walk Through Walls, Marina Abramović
- In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
- The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
- The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
favorite canons
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Michael Lewis
- Elena Ferrante
- Rainer Maria Rilke (letters)
- Flannery O'Connor (short stories)