Amazon link I mentioned in this post how I picked up Me++ at the Whitney Museum, and started reading it. Some interesting ideas here. I found out later from Jofish that Mitchell is the current head of the Media Lab at MIT, which explains a lot about the book. There’s nothing particularly innovative about his […]
Category: books
Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith
Amazon link While we were driving up to Cornell, Jofish recommended this book. I’d read another of Smith’s books, Spares, borrowed from the library, but it made absolutely no impact on me, and I didn’t remember a single detail. But, in the mornings, while waiting for others to wake up, I picked up Only Forward […]
Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse
Amazon link After seeing James Carse speak, I was eager to read his book, which I finally got around to doing on this vacation. It’s a deceptively simple book, with lots of short, simple sentences. But there’s a lot of thought packed into those sentences. I covered his overall gist in that previous post, where […]
Emotional Design, by Donald Norman
Amazon link I go back and forth on my feelings about Donald Norman. I think that his observation of The Design of Everyday Things was a really important insight in understanding how omnipresent the role of design is. I liked his idea of information appliances in The Invisible Computer. But I’ve always been left a […]
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
Amazon link Picked this up in my big library trip of a couple weeks ago. Again, recommended by a friend. Plus, I’ve been curious about Palahniuk since seeing Fight Club. I really like his stylized writing in a lot of ways, and it’s easy to see the resemblance to the style of Fight Club. I […]
King Rat, by China Mieville
Amazon link I remembered China Mieville’s name from Aneel’s book page, so when I stopped by the library, I looked him up, and this was the one book by him that they had. It’s somewhat in the same vein as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, describing a London with more dimensions than most of us ever get […]
Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
Amazon link I stopped by the library a few days ago and picked up a bunch of books that I was vaguely interested in, but not enough to toss into one of my Amazon orders. Mostly quick reads, so you’ll see several book reviews over the next couple weeks as I slam through them. This […]
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
Amazon link I’ve been talking about Gladwell for almost a month now, so it was high time I actually read Blink. The “thin-sliced” summary? It’s interesting, but shallow. By now, if you’ve read any of the interviews, or heard him speak on the radio, you probably know the premise of the book – that we […]
The Making of a Philosopher, by Colin McGinn
Amazon link I picked this up in a used bookstore because it purported to be McGinn’s “Journey through Twentieth-Century Philosophy”. I have a layman’s interest in philosophy (my humanities concentration at MIT was in the field), and was curious as to what some of the developments in the twentieth century were. Plus, it was cheap. […]
Experimentation Matters, by Stefan Thomke
Amazon link I’m not sure where I originally heard about this book, but given my preference for rapid prototyping in my work, I thought it would be interesting. Thomke is a Harvard Business School professor who’s spent the last ten years studying how experimentation is integrated into and leveraged by organizations. This book is his […]
