This page tracks books I’d like to read at some pointed, sorted by categories I find useful. It’s sortof like a a library, except I don’t own all of the books here yet.
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
I’ve had loads of people recommend this to me, and the concepts sound interesting..
The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin
I don’t always do well at finishing short-story collections, but that’s okay. The cover is cool so I feel like I have to.
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer
His ‘time travelers guide’ series sounds like a hoot. My library doesn’t have any of his other books available as an e-book so I’m going to give this one a shot first.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’engle
The movie made me notice this book’s absence from my too-read list (although I haven’t seen the movie yet, actually).
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
Her Sci-Fi series was great. Well, the first book in the series was great - I haven’t gotten to the rest of the trilogy &c.
The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick
Puttering About in a Small Land by Philip K. Dick
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter I don’t think I’ve read anything by Baxter, and I’ve read almost no non-Discworld Pratchett.
Farthing by Jo Walton
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind
I feel like I should read something by Goodkind at some point!
The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon
Flora Segunda by Ysabeau S. Wilce
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch
Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business
Scale by Geoffrey West The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
I’m not really sure why I have this in my too-read pile. At some point it sounded interesting? There are other corporate/industrial histories I want to read, maybe this was the modern variation of that theme?
Looking closer at the sub-head, I’m also interested in cities as a thing in and of themselves, so maybe that was the angle I was after here?
The Corporation That Changed the World by Nick Robins How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational
I’m interested in the history of the corporation, and the EIC (and maybe the VOC?) seem key parts of that. Some reviewers on Goodreads recommend starting with other EIC histories, however.
Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
Testing Treatments by Imogen Evans, Hazel Thornton, Iain Chalmers
We Saw Spain Die by Paul Preston Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War
The Origins of Business, Money and Markets by Keith Roberts
Keynes Hayek by Nicholas Wapshott The Clash that Defined Modern Economics
Wrong by David H. Freedman Why Experts Keep Failing Us and How to Know When Not to Trust Them
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The Misbehavior of Markets by Benoît B. Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
Dreamland by David K. Randall Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep
The Slumbering Masses by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life
Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Banana by Dan Koeppel The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
I feel like I’ve read this one - but I never marked it off on Goodreads so I’ll try to make sure to come back to it.
Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski
Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, Alja Brglez Uranjek (translator) Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
I don’t remember how this got on my list.
How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch
The Bankers’ New Clothes by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig Whats Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
24/7 by Jonathan Crary Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Do You Believe in Magic? by Paul A. Offit The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine
Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
My knowledge of US history (particularly around reconstruction, its aftermaths, and the lead-in to the civil-rights era of modern history) is pretty weak. There is also some random other history in here as well.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight
The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward, William S. McFeely
Smoke and Mirrors by Dan Baum The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure
Goodreads tells me I might also enjoy How Clean Is Your House.
I’ve spent a lot of time curating a reading list in this area but not actually getting the reading done. I’m not sure if that’s really useful, but it’s a thing.
Ethnographic studies are “out of date” by the time I would even hear of them - who knows how old they’ll be by the time I get around to this reading list.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh
From Poor Law to Welfare State by Walter I. Trattner A History of Social Welfare in America
The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination by Bradley R. Schiller
I’m interested in econ and in inequality. This sounds great, then!?
Promises I Can Keep by Kathryn Edin, Maria J. Kefalas Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Ain’t No Makin’ It by Jay MacLeod Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau Class, Race, and Family Life
Learning to Labor by Paul E. Willis
When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson The World of the New Urban Poor
Keeping Track by Jeannie Oakes How Schools Structure Inequality
Doing the Best I Can by Kathryn Edin, Timothy J. Nelson Fatherhood in the Inner City
Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol Children in America’s Schools
The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
I’m not sure where I found a reference to this book, but I wrote it down as something I should read.
And are good and I’d like to read more.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
I think I liked the first book, and Dan Simmons is interesting so I should keep going. But it’s been long enough that I would need to re-start from the begining.
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
This is yet another series I would need to re-read to jump back in to.
Elemental Logic Series by Laurie J. Marks
I am so excited for this series to be back. The whole series was a joy to read the first time around, and I’m looking forward to picking it back up from the beginning.
I’ve bounced off these, but they are probably good and I want to try them again.
Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold
I’ve really enjoyed the entries in this series I’ve read, but before picking it back up I would probably need to figure out what I have and haven’t read. I expect that will be hopeless and I should just start at one end and read them all through - I don’t think the reading I’ve done was in any particular order, so that would be okay.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
I’ve adored plenty of her other work, so it stands to reason I should like this one. Everything was just so bleak and a downer. That’s a legit choice and goal as an author, and probably makes the series what it is, but that made it hard for me to get grabbed by it.
Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe
This was fabulous. I want to go back to this.
Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
I’d made it thought 6 or 7 books or so, so I must have liked something. I think it was Reaper’s Gale I bounced off of - maybe I could skip that book next time? I was lost and had no clue how anything connected to any previous volume.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Wow I mean this should be exactly what I’m in to, but for whatever reason I couldn’t stuck with it. Which is a pity, I feel like I could get a lot out of this.
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
Okay this one’s cheating - I’ve read this cover-to-cover (and loved it), then forgot I’d read it, then picked it up again and got around half-way through. I would really like to finish my re-read and then pick up the sequel.