Books Read in Rough Chronological Order

Published 2016 September 11 ❧ Edited 2025 April 29

A list of books, stories and essays I have read made from memory in rough chronological order. Also: books that have been particularly helpful.

• Fingers Pointing to the Moon by Jane English.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol illustrated by Tove Janssen.
• On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.
• **Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg.
• All Fours by Miranda July.
• Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide by John Cleese. See also this talk.
• Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family by Jordan Mechner
• Color by Garry Winogrand, edited by Michael Almereyda and Susan Kismaric.
• Debugging Teams by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman.
• Lying by Sam Harris and Annaka Harris.
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin.
• The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht
• The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Arcade Game Typography by Toshi Omagari. Designed by Darren Wall and Leo Field.
• Drawing on the Dominant Eye by Betty Edwards
• Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Make Something Wonderful - Steve Jobs in his own words
• Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
• The First Protectors by Victor Godinez
• The Medium is the Massage - An Inventory of Effects
  by Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore
• A Village Life by Louise Glück
• Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• Cats, Cats, Cats from Andy Warhol
• To Fly and Fight by Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson
• Valparaiso by Sergio Larrain and Pablo Neruda
• Sergio Larrain by Sergio Larrain and Agnès Sire
• The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
• Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide by Alphonso Dunn
• Bill Peet: An Autobiography by Bill Peet
• The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
• Figure Drawing: For All It’s Worth by Andrew Loomis
• Keep Your Airspeed Up by Harold H. Brown
• Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi
• The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
• Diane Arbus: Revelations by Diane Arbus
• Going Solo by Roald Dahl
• We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• In the Picture: Self-Portraits 1958-2011 by Lee Friedlander
• Bad Weather by Martin Parr
• Self Portrait by Lee Friedlander
• The Last Resort by Martin Parr
• Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal by Jiddu Krishnamurti
• The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
• Listen to the Trees by John Sexton
• La Comète - Le Voyage de Rosetta by Jean-Pierre Bibring and Hanns Zischler
• A Village Life by Louise Glück
• Voices From The Moon by Andrew Chaikin and Victoria Kohl
• Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
• I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
• Pulvis Et Umbra by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels by William Klein
• Lost and Found by Bruce Gilden
• Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu (translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English)
• Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
• Teenage Lust by Larry Clark
• Thank You by Robert Frank
• Wall by Josef Koudelka
• Exiles by Josef Koudelka
• William Eggleston’s Guide by William Eggleston
• Boyhood Photos of J.H. Lartigue by J.H. Lartigue
• Mode In & Out by William Klein
• The Animals by Garry Winogrand
• Public Relations by Garry Winogrand
• Women Are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand and Helen Gary Bishop
• Killing Floor by Lee Child
• Nicaragua by Susan Meiselas
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick
• The Hand by Frank R. Wilson
• What Is Code by Paul Ford
• Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte
• The Psychopath Code by Pieter Hintjens
• Hold Still by Sally Mann
• The Catcher In The Rye by J. D. Salinger
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Coney Island by Bruce Gilden
• Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It by Geoff Dyer
• Art is Work by Milton Glaser
• Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
• Drawing is Thinking by Milton Glaser
• The Solitude of Ravens by Masahisa Fukase
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
• Wind, Sand, Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
• Planet Google by Randall Stross
• Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
• Zona by Geoff Dyer
• Vivian Maier: Street Photographer by Vivian Maier and John Maloof
• The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
• Another Great Day At Sea by Geoff Dyer
• Helen Levitt by Helen Levitt
• A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Magnum Contact Sheets
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• A Hanging by George Orwell
• Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
• Such, Such Were the Joys by George Orwell
• Harry Gruyaert by Harry Gruyaert
• The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich
• The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
• The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
• Cosmos by Carl Sagan
• American Photographs by Walker Evans
• The Americans by Robert Frank
• Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• Earthlings by Richard Kalvar
• Pragmatic Thinking And Learning by Andy Hunt
• Lisette Model by Lisette Model
• On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay
• The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel
• French Kiss by Anders Petersen
• Café Lehmitz by Anders Petersen
• A Beautiful Catastrophe by Bruce Gilden
• Gypsies by Josef Koudelka
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Workers by Sebastião Salgado
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
• The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Think On These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Ansel Adams: An Autobiography by Ansel Adams and Mary Street Alinder
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Black Spring by Henry Miller
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith
• Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm
• Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
• The Lord of The Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, David “Doc” Searls, David Weinberger & Rick Levine
• Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
• Graphic Design by Milton Glaser
• 1984 by George Orwell
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• The Psychiatrist by Machado de Assis
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum
• The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
• Various Dirk Pitt adventure novels by Clive Cussler
• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
• Yeager: An Autobiography by Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager
• Journals by Kurt Cobain
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• Chickenhawk by Robert Mason
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson by Henri Cartier-Bresson
• The First Thousand Words by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
• Gnomes by Wil Huygen and illustrated by Rien Poortvliet