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A list of my favorite books, in no particular order and with no particular applicability in mind.
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book_list.md

A List of my Favorite Books

I've categorized the books--roughly--by Big Theme: the header to each sub-list.

The Idea of America

  • "Debate on the Constitution, Vol. I and II", various (Library of America)
  • "The Praire Traveler", Randolph B. Marcy
  • "An American Tragedy", Theodore Dreiser
  • "The Great Gatsby", F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • "Poison Penmanship", Jessica Mitford
  • "Hard Rain Falling", Don Carpenter
  • "American Psycho", Bret Easton Ellis
  • "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business", Neil Postman
  • "Sidewalk", Mitchell Duneier
  • "Whose Names are Unknown", Sanora Babb
  • "The Executioner's Song", Norman Mailer
  • "The Ugly American", William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
  • "Moby Dick", Herman Melville
  • "Under the Banner of Heaven", Jon Krakauer
  • "Into the Wild", Jon Krakauer
  • "Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States", Pete Jordan
  • "The Naked and the Dead", Norman Mailer
  • Everything by Henry David Thoreau
  • "Post Office", Charles Bukowski
  • "Imperial", William T. Vollmann
  • "Riding Toward Everywhere", William T. Vollmann

Poverty

  • "Among the Thugs", Bill Buford
  • "Ulysses", James Joyce
  • "The Toilers of the Sea", Victor Hugo
  • "The Atlas", William T. Vollmann
  • "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", Barbara Ehrenreich
  • "The Working Poor: Invisible in America", David K. Shipler
  • "O'Connor: Collected Works", Flannery O'Connor, (Library of America)
  • "Angela's Ashes", Frank McCourt
  • "Up in the Old Hotel", Joseph Mitchell
  • "Poor People", William T. Vollmann
  • "Tunnel People", Teun Voeten

Life in Represive Regimes

  • "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty", Bradley K. Martin
  • "Cement", R. V. Gladkov
  • "The Captive Mind", Czeslaw Milosz
  • "Life and Fate", Vasily Grossman
  • "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea", Barbara Demick
  • "Europe Central", William T. Vollmann
  • "Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall", Anna Funder
  • "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and It's Dangerous Legacy", David E. Hoffman
  • "The Commissariat of Enlightenment", Ken Kalfus
  • "The Appointment", Herta Muller
  • "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • "Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories", various (edited by John Joseph Adams)
  • "The Orphan Master's Son", Adam Johnson
  • "Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War", Mark Danner
  • "Tyranny on Trial: The Trial of the Major German War Criminals at the end of Warl War II at Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946", Whitney R. Harris
  • "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror", Mark Danner
  • "Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter", Igor Kostin

Misc. Literature

  • "The Remains of the Day", Kazuo Ishiguro
  • "Journal of the Plague Year", Daniel Defoe
  • "Thirst", Andrei Gelasimov
  • "Dracula", Bram Stoker
  • "Timequake", Kurt Vonnegut
  • "Tree of Smoke", Denis Johnson
  • "Revolution Road", Richard Yates
  • "The Collected Stories of Richard Yates", Richard Yates
  • "Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories", Anton Chekhov
  • "The Reader", Bernhard Schlink
  • "The Sign of the Cross", Colm Toibin
  • "The Berlin Stories", Christopher Isherwood
  • "The Sagas of the Icelanders", Penguin Classics (Deluxe Edition)
  • "Argall", William T. Vollmann
  • "The Complete Stories", Franz Kakfka
  • "The Tain", translated by Thomas Kinsella
  • "The Stranger", Albert Camus
  • "The Fall", Albert Camus
  • "The Old Man and the Sea", Ernest Hemingway
  • Everything by Fyodor Doestoevsky
  • "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", Thornton Wilder
  • "Cathedral", Raymond Carver
  • "Saga of the Volsungs", translation by Jesse L. Byock
  • "Trainspotting", Irvine Welsh
  • "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", Muriel Spark
  • "Death on the Installement Plan", Louis-Ferdinand Celine
  • "Journey to the End of the Night", Louis-Ferdinand Celine
  • "The Night Triology: Night, Dawn and Day", Elie Wiesel
  • "Istanbul: Memories and the City", Orhan Pamuk
  • "The Iliad", Homer (translated by Richmond Lattimore)
  • "The Odyssey", Homer (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
  • "Into Thin Air", Jon Krakauer

History

  • "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism", Robert A. Pape
  • "A History of the Vikings", Gwyn Jones
  • "The Forever War.", Dexter Filkins
  • "Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages", M. I. Finley
  • "The Prince of the Marshes", Rory Stewart
  • "Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations", Norman Davies
  • "Empires of the World: A Language History of the World", Nicholas Ostler
  • "Europe: A History", Norman Davies
  • "The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950 - 1953", Clay Blair
  • "A History of Modern Iran", Ervand Abrahamian
  • "Iran: A People Interrupted", Hamid Dabashi

Engineering as a Culture, Computer Science and Logic

  • "Real-Time Systems: Design Principles for Distributed Embedded Applications", Hermann Kopetz
  • "Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation", Douglas N. Walton
  • "The Manhattan Project", edited by Cynthia C. Kelly
  • "Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin", Francis Spufford
  • "On Formally Undecided Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems", Kurt Godel (Dover edition, with R. B. Braithwaite's brilliant preface)
  • "Copenhagen", Michael Frayn
  • "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Richard P. Feynman
  • "Technology in Western Civilization, Vol 1.", various
  • "The Practice of Programming", Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
  • "Programming Pearls", Jon Bentley
  • "The Art of UNIX Programming", Eric S. Raymond
  • "The Collapse of Complex Societies", Joseph A. Tainter
  • "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight", David A. Mindell
  • "XIII: The Apollo Flight That Failed", Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.
  • "Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay", Charles Perrow
  • "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety", Eric Schlosser
  • "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster", Svetlana Alexievich
  • "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies", Charles Perrow
  • "Engineering in History", various (Dover edition)
  • "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", Richard Rhodes

Working

  • "Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs", various
  • "Working: People Talk about What They do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do", Studs Terkel
  • "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams", edited by M. L. Liebler
  • "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work", Alain de Botton

Science Fiction

  • "Federations", edited by John Joseph Adams
  • "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Robert A. Heinlein
  • "Starship Troopers", Robert A. Heinlein
  • "I, Robot", Isaac Asimov
  • "Fahrenheit 451", Ray Bradbury
  • "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War", Max Brooks

Letters, Essays and Plays

  • "Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine", various
  • "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkein", edited by Humphrey Carpenter
  • "Bash: Latterday Plays", Neil Labute
  • "The Story of Utopias", Lewis Mumford
  • "Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist", edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp
  • "Out of My Later Years", Albert Einstein
  • "Philosophy of Law: A Very Short Introduction", Raymond Wacks
  • "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Televion", Jerry Mander
  • "The Problems of Philosophy", Bertrand Russell
  • "The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present", Phillip Lopate
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