Books I Want
Here's a list of 130 books I'm interested in acquiring.
Before going into a bookstore, I review this list so they’re fresh in my mind and will stand out if I seem them on the shelf. Sadly, I rarely see them. When you keep track of a list like this, you come to appreciate just how many books there are in the world, and how rare it is that you will randomly stumble on a book you want.
Anyway, here’s the list. If you’re moved to buy me one of these for whatever reason, here is my contact information.
(I shuffle this list every time it’s displayed so the list isn’t biased by alphabet.)
“You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World
by Torie Bosch • 2022
Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind through Connected Notes
by Jorge Arango • 2024
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant • 2023
Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification
by Gene Kim, Stephen Spear • 2023
The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America
by Daniel Schulman • 2023
Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It
by Jennifer Breheny Wallace • 2023
The Whims of Fortune: The Memoirs of Guy de Rothschild
by Guy de Rothschild • 1985
A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects
by Kyle Chayka • 2024
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture:
by Jock Phillips • 2022
A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
by Nancy L. Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead • 2020
Advanced Web Application Architecture
by Matthias Noback • 2021
All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia
by Simon Garfield • 2023
Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany
by Jane Mount • 2018
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
by Anne Lamott • 1995
Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing
by John B. Thompson • 2021
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
by Robert D. Putnam • 2000
Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
by Chris Bail • 2021
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell • 2022
Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850
by Linda Colley • 2004
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
by Chris Miller • 2022
Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs
by Seth Alexander Thevoz • 2018
Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
by Peter Seibel • 2009
Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970
by Brandon Taylor • 2004
Cry Like a Man: Fighting for Freedom from Emotional Incarceration
by Jason Wilson • 2019
Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity
by Kyle Smith • 2022
Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion
by Francisco J. Ayala • 2007
Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems
2006
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides • 1994
Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future
by Jonathan Hillman • 2021
Double or Nothing: A Double O Novel
by Kim Sherwood • 2023
Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern
by Stuart Jeffries • 2021
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
by Arthur C. Brooks • 2022
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis • 2021
Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story
by Christopher Pugsley • 1984
GameTek: What games can teach us about life, the universe, and ourselves
by Geoffrey Engelstein • 2020
Great Novels: The World’s Most Remarkable Fiction Explored and Explained
2022
Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance
by Bob P. Buford • 2015
How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature
by Josh Cohen • 2021
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
by Pierre Bayard • 2007
Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman • 2020
Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy
by Supriya Vani, Carl A. Harte • 2021
Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought
by Jonathan Rauch • 2014
Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Player Characters
by Keith Ammann • 2020
Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design
by Cyrille Martraire • 2019
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy
by Tressie McMillan Cottom • 2018
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince • 2022
Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation
by Ramon Vullings, Marc Heleven • 2015
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It
by Richard Reeves • 2022
On Downtime and Demesnes
by Courtney Campbell • 2019
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
by Irene Vallejo • 2022
Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World
by Bethany McLean • 2018
Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry
by Helen Longino • 1990
Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons
by Ben Riggs • 2022
Stars and Spies: The Story of Intelligence Operations and The Entertainment Business
by Julius Green • 2021
Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old: A Highly Judgmental, Unapologetically Honest Accounting of All the Things Our Elders Are Doing Wrong
by Steven Petrow • 2021
Tales from the Back Row: An Outsider’s View from Inside the Fashion Industry
by Amy Odell • 2015
Taxonomies: Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information
by Helen Lippell • 2022
Temples of Books: Magnificent Libraries Around the World
by Marianne Julia Strauss • 2022
The Affluent Society
by John Kenneth Galbraith • 1958
The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking
by Miles Smit, Nicholas Capaldi • 2019
The Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Book
by Jerry Seinfeld • 2022
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
by Twyla Tharp • 2006
The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
by Freddy deBoer • 2020
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber, David Wengrow • 2021
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat • 2020
The Gentleman’s Clubs of London
by Anthony Lejeune • 1979
The Good-Enough Life
by Avram Alpert • 2022
The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
by Timothy Gallwey • 1997
The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America
by Stephen Johnson • 2008
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
by Russell Shorto • 2005
The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life
by Eugenia Cheng • 2022
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
by Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach • 2017
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
by Cailin O'Connor, James Own Weatherall • 2018
The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media
by Kevin Driscoll • 2022
The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters
by Keith Ammann • 2019
The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas
by David Bukus • 2013
The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
by Scott Woolley • 2017
The Personal Librarian
by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murphy • 2021
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
by Barbara Kingsolver • 2008
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert Caro • 1974
The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom
by Reid Byers • 2021
The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, Through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies
by Richard Kerbaj • 2022
The Selfish Gene
by RIchard Dawkins • 1976
The Six Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team
by Patrick Lencioni • 2022
The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide
by James D'Amato • 2022
The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy
by Megan Bannen • 2022
The World: A Family History of Humanity
by Simon Sebag Montefiore • 2023
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers
by Richard E. Neustadt • 1988
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
by BJ Fogg • 2021
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
by Mitchel Resnick • 1997
User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play
by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant • 2020
Who Owns the World: The Surprising Truth About Every Piece of Land on the Planet
by Kevin Cahill • 2010
Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
by Ian Morris • 2010
You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Dr. Adrian Hon • 2022
The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory
by Torkel Klingberg • 2008
Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity Kindle E
by Sander van der Linden • 2023
Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships
by Mitch Prinstein • 2018
Foundations of Library and Information Science
by Richard Rubin, Rachel Rubin • 2020
Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Framework for Teaching Critical Thinking to All Students
by Colin Seale • 2020
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
by Michael Isikoff, David Corn • 2007
Hacking Capitalism: Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money
by Kris Nóva, Ashley Bischoff • 2022
Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure
by Nick Tune, Jean-Georges Perrin • 2023
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman • 1985
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell • 1949
How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums
by Jillian M. Hess • 2022
How to Solve It
by George Polya • 1945
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
by Erving Goffman • 1959
Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot
by Peter Burke • 2000
Dahl’s History of the Book
by Bill Katz, Svend Dahl • 1995
The Book on the Bookshelf
by Henry Petroski • 2000
The Physics of Superheroes
by James Kakalios • 2005
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
by Bent Flyvbjerg, Dan Gardner • 2023
Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work
by Uri Gneezy • 2023
Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon
by William Cohan • 2022
The Ten Equations That Rule the World
by David Sumpter • 2021
Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior
by Erez Yoeli, Moshe Hoffman • 2022
On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care
by Victor Ray • 2022
An Atlas of Extinct Countries
by Gideon Defoe • 2022
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller the and World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson • 2016
Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History
2021
The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History
by Michael Warner • 2014
Cyberpunk, Steampunk, and Wizardry
by Nader Elhefnawy • 2015
Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle
by Christopher Manson • 1985
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe • 2022
The Hollow Man
by John Dickson Carr • 1935
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino • 1978
Build Your Own Database From Scratch
by James Smith • 2023
How Infrastructure Works
by Deb Chachra • 2023
Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson • 2019
Around the World in Eighty Games: From Tarot to Tic-Tac-Toe, Catan to Chutes and Ladders, a Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Games
by Marcus Du Sautoy • 2023