Jonathan’s reading list, Winter 2012
At a recent event featuring a great many people smarter than me (the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s wonderful #TAbridge workshop), I asked for recommendations on amazing books to read in the upcoming winter. This is what I got back, based on the following prompts:
Recommended on “networks, sharing, democracy”
- The Leviathan and the Penguin: The Promise of Cooperation, Yochai Benkler
- Weath of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler
- Africa, Richard Dowden
- The Corruption Notebooks: Volume 7, ed. Hazel Feigenblatt and Global Integrity
- Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency, Archon Fung, Mary Graham and David Weil – @arfung
- The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman
- “The Quiet Coup”, The Atlantic, Simon Johnson
- The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morezov
- Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, Peter Morville
- Thrivability, Jean Russell, editor
- Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott
- The Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky
- Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
- Republic.com, Cass Sunstein
- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, Joe Trippi
Recommended on “innovation” and “work”
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity, David Allen
- Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hannson
- Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is, Donald C. Gause; Gerald M. Weinberg
- The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande
- Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, Tim Harford
- The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Michael Lewis
- Moneyball, Michael Lewis
- Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
- Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
Recommended on Lean startup (credit these to @rabble)
- Business Model Generation, multiple authors
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Success Strategies for Products That Win, Steven Gary Blank
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries
- Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Ash Maurya
Recommended as “Great fiction”
- Twilight (and thank you so much for that totally not sarcastic suggestion, @brianherbert)
- Borderliners, Peter Hoeg
My thoughts
A few quick reactions.
- I’ve read several of these already, and this does a nice job of validating the set — all of the books I’ve read were quite good.
- Nearly all of the books I’ve read were handed to me by @innokate — so much for crowdsourcing; maybe you should just marry an expert.
- Of the authors with strongly gendered names, 100% of them are male. No ladies. Which goes a long way toward invalidating the set: besides some 50% of the population, how many other viewpoints are not represented here? Hard to tell.
Request
Dear readers: please hack this list by posting suggestions in comments (some women, maybe?). I’ll recombine (along with input from other crowds) and share back on a later post.
This list, like all posts here, is Creative Commons by/nc — feel free to repost and adapt.
– @eylerwerve
Thumbnail image — CC by/nc (Shop Boy)
My FB peeps suggest:
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
ReWork, by the 37 signals people
They also point out that Twilight is written by a woman. A woman who will stand by her werewolf, no matter what.
I’m not reading Twilight. I am looking forward to The Hunger Games
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.
Does not fall under any categories listed, but it’s about Chicago and the World’s Fair and serial murder and there are pygmies. Nonfiction. Really well researched, really good.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Add to “Work”: Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. “Innovation”: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley.
Thanks to Jen, Melissa, Blake for solid suggestions.