Books on your desk
Quick! List the set of books currently sitting on your desk:
- Management, Peter F. Drucker
- Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely
- Mythical Man Month, Frederick P. Brooks
- The Republic, Plato
- The Complete, Fully Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll
- Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
- Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman
- Start-up, Jerry Kaplan
- Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The Klutz Book of Knots, John Cassidy
On my desk: none.
In my reachable bookshelf:
lots of assorted math and physics textbooks
_The Emperor's New Mind_ - Roger Penrose
_Microserfs_ - Douglas Coupland
I won't bother to amazon linkify because LAST TIME I DID SO MY GOLD BOX GOT STUFFED FULL OF SEX TOYS AND I DID NOT APPRECIATE THAT
Short reviews (but not summaries, you can google for those) of the books I listed:
- Microserfs is probably my favorite work of modern fiction, but that's just off the top of my head.
- Penrose spends ~500 pages in ENM summarizing half the body of physics knowledge and then leaves ~20 pages for his "groundbreaking" hypothesis. It was written in '88 and he penned a sequel (_The Shadows of the Mind_) in '94 (?) which I picked up at the library, but haven't had time to really start yet. It looks more like a second edition of ENM than a totally new sequel, however.
Hurp.
Love Is Hell - Matt Groening
School Is Hell - Matt Groening
Confessions of Teenage Hackers - Dan Verton
His Dark Materials Pt. 1-3 - Philip Pullman
Redwall - Brian Jacques
Pearls Of Lutra - Brian Jacques
The Long Patrol - Brian Jacques
Starcraft #1: Liberty's Crusade - Jeff Grub
Starcraft #3: Speed Of Darkness - Tracy Hickman
Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks
Unix For Dummies
FreeBSD Manual
The Pelican Brief - John Grisham
Zebra - Clark Howard
HOW TO SAY IT IN HUNGARIAN (Tankonyvkiado)
Old but probably still useful.
JOY OF COOKING (Rombauer / Rombauer Becker)
Only cookbook you'll ever need.
DESIGNING FOR CHILDREN (Heller / Guarnaccia)
Piece of shit, almost 100 days overdue
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (Thomas Mann)
Long but excellent. Try to read it in a week or two, no more. Do it as fast as possible. It's as dense and enjoyable as Death in Venice.
INTERACTION OF COLOR (Albers)
Useful, a bit Goethey in the language
DESIGNERS GUIDE TO COLOR (Stockton)
Limited but useful (lots of color combinations)
RENDERING WITH MARKERS (Kemnitzer)
Excellent resource on doing one particular style of rendering. Very practical, good illustrations.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE - ESSAYS (MONTAIGNE)
Fun to read
1800 WOODCUTS BY THOMAS BEWICK (Dover Clipart)
Dover clipart libraries are amazing. I have a bunch of them.
DESIGNER'S NOTEBOOK (Bockus)
Very nitty gritty type thing on production and things like that. Slightly overblown.
SWANN'S WAY (Proust)
Ever have one of those "I'M GAY" epiphanies? I just did.
DELL TRUEMOBILE MANUAL
Useless documentation in the Dell tradition. Having said that, I love wireless internet. Having 400Kb/s on your lap is a nice feeling.
Dude you people are dorks.
There's one book that ISN'T on my desk that I would LIKE TO HAVE on my desk. I think you KNOW WHAT BOOK THAT IS. Seriously get that thing printed, I'll order a dozen.
Commutative Rings by M. Artin
Algebraic Number Theory by Frohlich and Taylor
Valuation Theory by O. Endler
Modules and Group Algebras by Jon F. Carlson
Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs
Categories for the Working Mathematician by Saunders MacLane
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Nothing on my desk, but on the floor between my bed and the desk:
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Kill Your Boyfriend - Grant Morrison (do comics count?)
The Tao Te Ching, Brian Browne Walker Translation
The Tao Te Ching, James Legge Translation
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Life and Times of Rasputin - Penny Stempel
Luminous - Greg Egan
Virtual Light - William Gibson
The Mind of God - Paul Davies
The Book of Nothing - John D. Barrow
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
Pastwatch - Orson Scott Card
Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics - Ralph Grimaldi (It makes a great mousepad)
Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
Naked - David Sedaris
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Fermata - Nicholson Baker
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth (The Jewish Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Codes, Ciphers & Other Cryptic & Clandestine Communication - Fred B. Rixon
Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Learning Perl - Randal Schwartz & Tom Phoenix
PHP And PostgreSQL Advanced Web Programming - Geschwinde & Schonig
C++ How To Program - Deitel & Deitel (got caught on a stupid precision error)
Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Hofstadter (that makes 3 of us in a row)
and the Master of Orion 3 strat guide waiting for Wednesday.
Uh...I don't know how to say this but my copy of GEB was behind the turntable. So that makes 4. RICERCAR.
All these are on my desk. What a dork.
Wisdom of the Buddha - Siddartha
Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus
The Republic - Plato
Billions and Billions - Carl Sagan
The Analects - Confucious
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays - Thoreau
Utopia - More
Shanghai Baby - Wei Hui
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories - Kafka
1000 Play Thinks - Ivan Moscovich
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying - Sogyal Rinpoche
Hunter S. Thompson - The Proud Highway
Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstacy - Rudolph Grey
Yoga for Beginners - Mark Ansari and Liz Lark
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night - Scott Rice
No One Lives Forever 2 manual - some guy
Red Hat Linux Bible - Christopher Negus
Jerkcity: BIG, STIFF (ALSO UNCUT) - Rands, Pants, Spigot, Deuce, Atandt, Ozone, Net (rare test print)
CURRENT BOOKS: THE JOY OF COOKING
CURRENT MUSIC: AVRIL LAVIGNE!!! JEW SKATER CHIX R00L
CURRENT SEX: HARDCORE ANAL W/ CLEANUP BLOWJOBS
I don't sit at a desk. But on my table at home next to my bed are:
Mary Ann Caws: Manifesto, a Century of ism's -- which is very interesting if you like the history of ideas. It basically collects all the written manifestos of the various artistic movements of the 20th Century.
and
Mark Prendergast: The Ambient Century -- which is about the evolution of ambient music from the early 12-tone classical composers in the 1900's to today. He's somewhat vague about what ambient music actually IS, but he has lots of information about obscure 60's psych and folk bands, along with lots of other good stuff.
hmm, what's on my draftuing table / desk :
A bunch of X ray crystallography books from the library
McCrone's Microscopy Book - Cool, OOP and no new editions - RIP man!
Peter S. Beagle's thoughtful book on Heironymous Bosch and the garden of Earthly Delight, OOP and a great coffee table book.
Take on the Street by Arthur Levitt
teach Yourself Visually microsoft office 2000
(or Microsoft for Martians)
Pease & Luv,
Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (recently finished)
Notes From Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Zap Gun, by Philip K. Dick
The Man Who Japed, by Philip K. Dick
Fences and Windows, by Naomi Klein
Simulation and Simulacra, by Jean Beaudrillard
(there are still more, but I think you get the idea that I read a fucking hella lot.)
I'm noticing a pattern here: sci-fi, Eastern philosophy, technical books, and cosmology popularisations. Ladies and gentlemen, we are geeks. The next question is what music is everyone listening to? If anyone says Dream Theater, then it's pretty much case closed on the geek question.
Dear Shrike & Rands;
hmmmm, music:
anything from Hearts of Space:
http://www.hos.com/radio.html
and echoes:
http://www.echoes.org
and Brian Eno.
Proud to be a Geek..;-)
Peace,
There someone goes changing the frickin' topic. Well screw theat. Here's what's on my desk.
Acts of the Apostles and Cheap Complex Devices by John Sundman
TCP/IP Network Administration (alas, 2nd ed) by Craig Hunt
the Onion's Ad Nauseum
Knights of the Dinner Table: Tales from the Vault Vol 3 by Jolly Blackburn
Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System
Paranoia (2nd ed) by West End Games
Since I've finished GEB (and also Metamagical Themas) they're on the bookshelf, not the desk.
Oh yeah??
The Ruined Map - Kobo Abe
Fish Tales - Nettie Jones
Invisible Monsters, Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Mysteries - Knut Hamsun
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
The Decameron - Boccaccio (does he even have a first name?)
Perhaps "elitist bastard" would better fit some of us.
Maybe we just crave a little something more than David Eddings or Robert Ludlum?
Okay, I think that was my vote for "elitist bastard."
fashionably late..
best new horror 4 - edited by stephen jones and ramsey campbell
memory and dream - charles de lint
and if magazines count..
idn magazine volume 9 issue 4
newtype usa feb 2003
also a notebook labled.. wait for it.. "notes".
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