The reading list anthology.

This list is not an endorsement of the authors or their views. It is simply a record of works I have read and engaged with over the years. References are provided for historical context only.

For a list of all time favourites, see directory. Stars next to book titles indicate a second reading, highlighted rows indicate that year's favourite.

In Progress

• Liberer L'Avenir: Ivan Illich
• Mémoires d'Hadrien: Marguerite Yourcenar
• Le Matin Des Magiciens*: L. Pauwels & J. Bergier
• Middlemarch: George Eliot
• Dune: The Butlerian Jihad: Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson

Reading list 2025

• The Secret History: Donna Tartt
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Goldfinch: Donna Tartt
• Banvard's Folly: Paul Collins
• Patterns Of Software: Richard P. Gabriel
• Artemis: Andy Weir
• A History of Thinking on Paper: Roland Allen
• Threaded Interpretive Languages: R. G. Loeliger
• Ill Met By Moonlight: Sarah A. Hoyt
• The Silmarillion: J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Butterfly Revolution: William Butler
• Anthem: Ayn Rand
• Ancillary Justice: Ann Leckie
• Books & Portraits*: Virginia Woolf
• The Search For The Perfect Language: Umberto Eco
• The Outsiders: S. E. Hinton
• The Glass Bead Game: Hermann Hesse
• Bhagavad Gita: Vyasa
• Blindness*: José Saramago

Reading list 2024

• The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson
• La Horde Du Contrevent: Alain Damasio
• The Last Great Sea: Terry Glavin
• The Martian: Andy Weir
• How Not to Age: Michael Greger
• Flowers For Algernon: Daniel Keyes
• West With The Night: Beryl Markham
• Les Enfants Terribles: Jean Cocteau
• Term Rewriting and All That: Franz Baader, Tobias Nipkow
• Technology & the Character Of Contemporary Life: Albert Borgmann
• Erewhon: Samuel Butler
• The Fountainhead*: Ayn Rand
• Technophilia and Its Discontents: Ellen Ullman
• The Democracy Of Species: Robin Wall Kimmerer
• A Serious Joke: Michael Maier
• No. 44*: Mark Twain
• I Will Fight No More Forever: Merrill D. Beal
• In Cold Blood: Truman Capote
• Everyday Utopia: Kristen Ghodsee
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle
• Project Hail Mary: Andy Weir
• Selected Poems: Emily Dickinson
• How We’d Talk if the English had Won in 1066: David Cowley
• A Mathematician's Lament: Paul Lockhart
• Books & Portraits: Virginia Woolf
• Congo Éteint: Finkelstein, Tshinza, Mpanga, Kutemba..

Reading list 2023

• Le Péril bleu: Maurice Renard
• Mathematics Made Difficult: Carl E. Linderholm
• The Journey Home: Edward Abbey
• Courier Sud: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• The Machine Stops*: E. M. Forster
• The Unknowable: G.J. Chaitin
• Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice: Glen Krasner
• Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines: Marvin Minsky
• Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder
• The Story Of B: Daniel Quinn
• Roadside Picnic: Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
• Lord Of The Flies: William Golding
• Sylvie and Bruno: Lewis Carroll
• Homage to Catalonia: George Orwell
• Robot: Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg
• Dealers Of Lightning: Michael Hiltzik
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: Selma Lagerlöf
• Walden Two: B. F. Skinner
• The Catcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger
• Blumroch L'Admirable*: Louis Pauwels
• The Tartar Steppe: Dino Buzzati

Reading list 2022

• The Dawn of Everything: David Graeber and David Wengrow
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Shirley Jackson
• To Mock a Mockingbird: Raymond Smullyan
• Watership Down: Richard Adams
• The Magic Of Lewis Carroll: John Fisher
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: Oliver Sacks
• The Life Of Santoka Taneda: Sumita Oyama
• The Unsettling Of America: Wendell Berry
• What the Dormouse Said: John Markoff
• Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions: Martin Gardner
• A Pattern Language: Christopher Alexander
• Autobiographical Notes: Jorge Luis Borges
• La Technique: Jaques Ellul
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*: Douglas Adams
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe*: Douglas Adams
• Life, the Universe and Everything*: Douglas Adams
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish*: Douglas Adams
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Andreas Malm
• Gulliver's Travels: Jonathan Swift
• Le Petit Prince*: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• À rebours: Joris-Karl Huysmans
• Muqaddimah: Ibn Khaldûn

Reading list 2021

• Starting Forth*: Leo Brodie
• The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: Kevin A. Carson
• The Monkey Wrench Gang: Edward Abbey
• Thinking Forth: Leo Brodie
• Vol de Nuit: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Terre Des Hommes: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Pantagruel: Francois Rabelais
• Reset: Ronald J. Deibert
• Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form: Christopher Alexander
• Mingming and the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing: Roger D. Taylor
• Comment tout peut s'effondrer: Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens
• The Swarm: Frank Schätzing
• Journal de l'année de la peste: Daniel Defoe
• Le Bateau ivre, et autres poemes: Arthur Rimbaud
• The Stories: Ray Bradbury
• L'Aveuglement: José Saramago
• The Summer Book: Tove Jansson

Reading list 2020

• Made to break: Giles Slade
• Wandering Island: Kenji Tsuruta
• 6502 Assembly Programming Language: Mike Smith
• Nouvelles pensées échevelées: Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
• Dracula: Bram Stoker
• Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde: René Girard
• Tamata et l'alliance: Bernard Moitessier
• Frankenstein: Mary Shelley
• Macintosh Pascal Programming Primer: Dave Mark & Cartwright Reed
• Elements of Computing Systems: Noam Nisan & Shimon Schocken
• The Invisible Computer: Donald A. Norman
• The Long Way: Bernard Moitessier
• The Dispossessed: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Solaris*: Stanislaw Lem
• The Complete Cosmicomics: Italo Calvino
• One Human Minute: Stanislaw Lem
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
• The Incredible Tide: Alexander Key
• Don Quixote: Miguel De Cervantes Saaverda
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: Walter M. Miller
• Tactics for Single-Handed Sailing: Andrew Evans
• Finite and Infinite Games: James P. Carse
• The Golden Apples of the Sun: Ray Bradbury
• The Timeless Way of Building: Christopher Alexander
• Purgatorio: Dante Alighieri
• One Straw Revolution: Masanobu Fukuoka
• What Are People For: Wendell Berry
• How to Build a Working Digital Computer*: Wolk, Alcosser & Phillips

Reading list 2019

• Cyclonopedia: Reza Negarestani
• Who Owns The Future: Jaron Lanier
• Practical Ethics: Peter Signer
• Embassytown: China Miéville
• The Art of UNIX Programming: Eric S. Raymond
• Xenofeminism: Helen Hester
• Land Of Lisp: Conrad Barski
• The Word for World is Forest: Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Accelerationist Reader: Robin Mackay
• Collected Shorts: H. P. Lovecraft
• Sailing The Farm: Ken Neumeyer
• Assemblage Theory: Manuel DeLanda
• Rasselas: Samuel Johnson
• Inventing the Future: Nick Srnicek
• Manuel De Résistance Contemporaine: Cyril Dion
• Girls Last Tour: Tsukumizu
• Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi
• How To Do Nothing: Jenny Odell
• La Société du spectacle: Guy Debord

Reading list 2018

• Hermeneutics: John D. Caputo
• Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu
• Letters From A Stoic: Seneca
• Animal Farm: George Orwell & Russel Baker
• Last Chance to See: Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine
• The Arabian Nights: Anonymous
• The Stack: Benjamin H. Bratton
• The Futurological Congress: Stanislaw Lem
• The Cyberiad: Stanislaw Lem
• Ishmael: Daniel Quinn
• Godforsaken Sea: Derek Lundy
• The Tao Of Pooh: Benjamin Hoff
• The Te Of Piglet: Benjamin Hoff
• The Book Of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi
• Hagakure: Tsunetomo Yamamoto
• Don't Sleep There Are Snakes: Daniel L. Everett
• On Trails: Robert Moor
• The Sixth Extinction: Elizabeth Kolbert
• The Empty Mirror: Janwillem Van De Wetering
• Industrial Society and Its Future: Theodore Kaczynski
• Animal Liberation: Peter Signer
• On Food and Cooking: Harold McGee

Reading list 2017

• Pictures From The Water Trade: John David Morley
• A Calendar Of Wisdom: Tolstoy
• The Art Of War: Sun Tzu
• Superintelligence: Nick Bostrom
• Kokoro: Natsume Soseki
• From AI To Zombies: Eliezer Yudkowsky
• In Praise Of Darkness: Jorge Luis Borges
• Self-Sufficient Sailor: Lin Pardey
• Travels in Hyperreality: Umberto Eco
• North To The Night: Alvah Simon
• Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: Caitlin Doughty
• The Fungi Of Yuggot: H. P. Lovecraft
• In The Dust Of This Planet: Eugene Thacker
• The Japanese Art of Decluttering: Marie Kondo
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Robert M. Pirsig
• Meditations: Marcus Aurelius

Reading list 2016

• Seraffyn's Oriental Adventure: Lin & Larry Pardey
• Guns, Germs & Steel: Jared M. Diamond
• Predictable Irrational: Dan Ariely
• How Not To Die: Michael Greger
• The China Study: T. Colin Campbell
• Letter To My Father: Franz Kafka
• Le Ton Beau De Marot: Douglas Hofstadter
• Beyond Good & Evil: Friedrich Nietzche
• The Circle: Dave Eggers
• Blumroch L'Admirable: Louis Pauwels
• The Book Of Tea: Okakura Kakuzō
• Journals: Henry David Thoreau
• Walden*: Henry David Thoreau
• Le Matin Des Magiciens*: L. Pauwels & J. Bergier

incoming: devine lu linvega directory routine 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021