Books I want to read

Non-fiction

• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

• Letters to a Young Scientist

• Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

• Thinking in Systems

• Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation

Social

• The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

• Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

• The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

• Poor Charlie's Almanac

• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

• The Ohlone Way

Writing

• Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

• Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

• Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose

• Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

• Writing for Developers

Statistics

• The Data Detective

• Introduction to Empirical Bayes: Examples from Baseball Statistics

• Statistics Done Wrong

• Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers

History

• A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

• The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

• A People's History of Computing in the United States

• The Computer Boys Take Over

• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

• Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology

• Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT

• Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

• Dreaming in Code

• Go Computer Now! – The Story of Sphere Computers

• The Origins of Efficiency

• The Making of Prince of Persia

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Technology

• Reamde

• In the Beginning... Was the Command Line

• Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

Engineering

• Programming as If People Mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions

• Brutal Refactoring: More Working Effectively with Legacy Code

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

• Software Design for Flexibility

• Designed for Use

• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

• Pieces of the Action

• Inventing the Future

• Inventing the Future: Bit by Bit

• Almost Perfect: How a Bunch of Regular Guys Built WordPerfect Corporation

• Bootstrapping Computing

Personal

• The Curious World of Seaweed

• Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

• Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources

• This is Vegan Propaganda

• An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

• The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

• The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

• Tracing the Line: The Art of Drawing Machines and Pen Plotters

• A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

• Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership

• Practical Doomsday

Travel

• Mountains and Marshes: Exploring the Bay Area's Natural History

• Bicycle Diaries

• The Midlife Cyclist

• Tracks, Tires, & Wires: Public Transportation in California's Santa Clara Valley

• Bart: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System

Infrastructure

• Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

• Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom

• Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

• Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change

• Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives

• Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

• The All-Road Bike Revolution

• Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation

• Car Country: An Environmental History

• Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

• Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System

• A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

Woodworking

I'm not interested in decorative woodworking pieces, but I'd like to work with hand tools to build small furniture and other functional items for around the house. Most of the learning material I've found online focuses on tool choice and maintenance, which are a huge factor in success, but not the goal for me. Aside from those, there are a lot of plans available for shop projects, like sawhorses and toolboxes, which I also lack motivation to see through.

• Simple Japanese Furniture uses basic wood products and low-skill woodworking to produce functional furniture in a distinctive style. The hope is that this is a foothold into expanding my woodworking for household items.

• The Anarchist's Design Book is Western-focused but explains how to design furniture for hand tool woodworking.

• The Complete Japanese Joinery might have too many joints, but hopefully will cover the basic ones well enough so I can use them instead of needing more material/tool-intensive fastening. It may also have older, less popular joints that better fit my style of woodworking.

• Wood and Traditional Woodworking in Japan and the construction-oriented Japanese Wood and Carpentry discuss the wood species used by Japanese woodworkers, so they may not be directly relevant to my hobby. Maybe I could use these to compare Japanese wood species to those available to me.

• Sharpening and the Japanese Hand Plane illustrates how to sharpen and fit hand planes, which is notoriously tricky to learn. I'm very nervous about doing permanent damage to my one expensive hand plane, so I'd like this to put me on the right track.

• Sharpen This has a Western take on sharpening hand tools, but was inexpensive when I made a larger Lost Art Press order and might be good to have as a reference in the "shop".

• Ingenious Mechanicks frames woodworking in the counter-culture style that I love (like information technology and cycling) for Western carpenters. I'm not sure this will help with Japanese-style tools and work.

• Worked: A Bench Guide to Hand-Tool Efficiency hopefully has some good advice on ergonomics for hand tool woodworking.

• Cut & Dried: A Woodworker's Guide to Timber Technology and With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood both provide information about how wood grows and the best way to use it.

• Essential Japanese Joinery: Fundamental Tools & Techniques of Japanese Woodworking might have some practical advice on straightforward projects, but could also get bogged down in the theatre of woodworking.

Fiction

I don't read fiction very often because it feels less productive than non-fiction, but I'm clearly missing out. It's strange because I don't restrict myself from experiencing fiction in other mediums.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again might be a good way to get into David Foster Wallace.

• What You Are Looking for Is in the Library

• A Confederacy of Dunces

• The Wayfinder