Books, Read (2013–2020)
In 2013 I set a goal to read one book per month. Turns out I just like reading. This post will be updated as books are completed and years pass.
Full library here. Recommendations welcome!
Last updated January 5, 2021
2020
- The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec
- Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism by Slavoj Žižek
- The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco
- On Writing by Jorge Luis Borges
- To Rouse Leviathan by Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin
- Semiotic Animal: A postmodern definition of human being transcending Patriarchy and Feminism by John Deely
- Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture by Claude Lévi-Strauss
- The Taiga Syndrome by Christina Rivera Garza
- The Wounds of the Dead by Vikram Paralkar
- Komodo by Jeff VanderMeer
- A Natural History of Hell by Jeffery Ford
- The Pocket Rumi edited by Kabir Helminski
- The Framework of Language by Roman Jakobson
- The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel
- Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology by Esther Lightcap Meek
- Utopia by Thomas More
- To Know As We Are Known by Parker Palmer
- In the Seat of a Stranger's Car by Beau Flemister
- Theory of Type Design by Gerard Unger
- What the Heck is EOS? by Gino Wickman
- Be The Bridge: Pursuing God’s Heart for Racial Reconciliation by Latasha Morrison
- The Sellout by Paul Beatty
- Earwig by Brian Catling
- A Peculiar Peril by Jeff VanderMeer
- This World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer
- The People in the Castle by Joan Aiken
- Symbol, Myth, and Culture by Ernst Cassirer
- Out of Body by Jeffrey Ford
- Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
- The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila
- Underland by Robert Macfarlane
- Speaker of Ma’ila by Trenton Anthony
- Stoner by John Williams
- Thus Were Their Faces by Silvia Ocampo
- The Silence by Don DeLillo
- Signs by Thomas Sebeok
- Under the Sea by Mark Leidner
- Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti
- The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
- Magic: A History by Chris Gosden
- The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
2019
- Fox 8 by George Saunders
- Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
- Moderan by David R. Bunch
- Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey
- Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy [audiobook]
- Anthem by Ayn Rand
- Phantastes By George MacDonald
- Florida by Lauren Groff
- Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan
- Mr. Pye by Mervyn Peake
- The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake by G.E. Bentley
- The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis
- The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson
- Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith
- A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
- Member by Michael Cisco
- An Alien Heat, Volume One of “The Dancers at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock
- The Hollow Lands, Volume Two of “The Dancers at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock
- The End of All Song, Volume Three of “The Dancers at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
- Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton
- ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies by John Langan
- Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy
- The Light is the Darkness by Laird Barron
- Recursion by Blake Crouch
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
- The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford
- Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore
- 33⅓: Master of Reality by John Darnielle
- 33⅓: Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
- Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
- Crackpot Palace by Jeffrey Ford
- The Attributes of God by A. W. Tozer
- African Folk Tales edited by Charlotte & Wolf Leslau
- Hawaiian Mythologies by Martha Beckwith
- Circe by Madeline Miller
- Upstream by Mary Oliver
- Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard
- Warren by Brian Evenson
- The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander
- Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
- Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer
- A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
- The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
2018
- The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
- Postmodernism in Pieces by Matthew Mullins
- Mythologies by Roland Barthes
- In The Distance by Hernan Diaz
- The Changeling by Victor LaValle
- The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St Clair
- The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
- The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
- The Accusation by Bandi
- Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler
- In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
- The History of Bees by Maja Lunde
- The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
- Language, Truth and Logic by Alfred Jules Ayer
- The Narrator by Michael Cisco
- When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
- Elements of Semiology by Roland Barthes
- In the River by Jeremy Robert Johnson
- The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis
- Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones
- Contradict by Andy Wrasman
- The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar
- White Tears by Hari Kunzru
- The Solid Form of Language by Robert Bringhurst
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Aickman’s Heirs edited by Simon Strantzas
- Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
- Unlanguage by Michael Cisco
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design by Vilém Flusser
- Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
- Embassytown by China Miéville
- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
- The Cloven by Brian Catling
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
- Blow-up, and other stories by Julio Cortázar
- In The Darkroom by Susan Faludi
- CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
- Deeper Into Pictures by Flint Schier
- Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
- A Little Manual for Knowing by Esther Lightcap Meek
- Boy in Darkness, and Other Stories by Mervyn Peake
- Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones
- Crandolin by Anna Tambour
- Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
- Compass by Mathias Énard
- Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
2017
- Time Travel by James Gleick
- Don’t Read This Book by Donald Roos
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
- Sprint by Jake Knapp
- Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
- Culture Making by Andy Crouch
- Benjamin Franklin by Carl van Doren
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing by Mark Fox and Angie Wang
- Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
- Intercom on Starting Up by Intercom
- Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
- Borne: A Novel by Jeff Vandermeer
- The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson
- The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- This is Not a Pipe by Michel Foucault
- What’s Best Next by Matt Perman
- The Strange Bird by Jeff Vandermeer
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- The Vorrh by Brian Catling
- Asteroid Made of Dragons of G. Derek Adams
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
- Bernini in Rome: Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Baroque in Rome by Paul den Arend
- The Erstwhile by Brian Catling
- Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come by Wally Olins
- The North Water by Ian McGuire
- The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
- The Fisherman by John Langan
- The Sarah Book by Scott McLanahan
- Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
2016
- Goya by Robert Hughes
- Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose
- The Presidency of George Washington by Forrest McDonald
- Essentialism by Greg McKeown
- Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Language and Myth by Ernst Cassirer
- Wonder by A. J. Palacio
- The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
- Dog Stars by Peter Heller
- The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
- Area X: The Southern Reach: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
- Area X: The Southern Reach: Authority by Jeff Vandermeer
- Area X: The Southern Reach: Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer
- The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
- The Princess and The Goblin by George MacDonald
- The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
- The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
- Slade House by David Mitchell
- The Hike by Drew Magary
- Zero K by Don DeLillo
2015
- Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
- Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles by Francine Prose
- You and Me Forever by Francis and Lisa Chan
- The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
- Tenth of December by George Saunders
- The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
- The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
- Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosphers by Leonard Koren
- Basics of Semiotics by John Deely
- Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Expuréry
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
- Proof by Daniel Montgomery and Timothy Paul Jones
- Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee
- Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut
2014
- Color Psychology and Color Therapy by Faber Birren
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Paul Rand: Conversations with Students by Michael Kroeger
- Emotional Branding by Marc Gobé
- Just My Type by Simon Garfield
- Wild at Heart by John Eldredge
- The Strategic Designer by David Holston
- Common Sense by Thomas Paine
- Confessions by St Augustine
- Love Wins by Rob Bell
- Erasing Hell by Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle
- Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
- EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey
- Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
2013
- How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy
- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
- God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee by Michaele Weissman
- Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler
- Brand Identity Essentials
- The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
- Design is a Job by Joe Montero
- The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player by John C. Maxwell
- ideaSelling by Sam Harrison
- Ways of Seeing by John Berger
- A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
- Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
- Design As Art by Bruno Munari
- On Writing by Stephen King
- The Creative Gift by H. R. Rookmaaker
- The Beginner’s Guide to Colour Psychology by Angela Wright
- Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing by Søren Kierkegaard
Back to Writing