rorysaur.blog

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)