Books
I love books. Below are a selection of the books I’ve read in the past decade that have informed my approach to design, research, strategy, technology, work, and life.
Closing the Loop
Sheryl Cababa
Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman
The World Beyond Your Head
Matthew B. Crawford
The End of Burnout
Jonathan Malesic
Writing Is Designing
Michael J Metts, Andy Welfle
Sense and Respond
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
Conversations with Things
Diana Deibel, Rebecca Evanhoe
What Can a Body Do?
Sara Hendren
The Art of Action
Stephen Bungay
Stolen Focus
Johann Hari
How to Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows
Measuring the User Experience
William Albert, Thomas Tullis
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
John Mark Comer
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
The 2-Hour Job Search (2nd Edition)
Steve Dalton
Silence, Joy
Thomas Merton
Wintering
Katherine May
Move Your DNA
Katy Bowman
Equal Partners
Kate Mangino
The Silmarillion
J.R.R. Tolkien
Paul and the Power of Grace
John M. G. Barclay
The Life We're Looking For
Andy Crouch
Cloud Atlas
David Stephen Mitchell
The Every
Dave Eggers
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
David Flanagan
Personal Kanban
Jim Benson, Tonianne DeMaria Barry
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette
Nathan W. Pyle
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Howl's Moving Castle
Diana Wynne Jones
The Shortest History of War
Gwynne Dyer
Tiny Habits
B. J. Fogg
The Constitution of Knowledge
Jonathan Rauch
Wanting
Luke Burgis
Lost in Thought
Zena Hitz
Reading the Times
Jeffrey Bilbro
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
David Graeber
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Pearl Poet
The Rivers North of the Future
David Cayley, Ivan Illich
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
Art Direction for the Web
Andy Clarke
Breaking Bread with the Dead
Alan Jacobs
Making and Breaking the Grid
Timothy Samara
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud
In the Vineyard of the Text
Ivan Illich
Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English
Douglas Biber
The Frailest Thing
LM Sacasas
The Death of Expertise
Thomas M. Nichols
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays
Paul Kingsnorth
On the Shortness of Life
Seneca
The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst
Thinking with Type
Ellen Lupton
The Elements of Music
Jason Martineau
Beowulf
Anonymous Beowulf Poet
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
The Intellectual Life
A. G. Sertillanges
House Of X / Powers Of X
Jonathan Hickman
The Glass Cage
Nicholas Carr
The Shallows
Nicholas G. Carr
The American Spirit
David McCullough
The Princess Bride
William Goldman
Celtic Gods and Heroes
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt
The Tech-Wise Family
Andy Crouch
The Tyranny of Metrics
Jerry Z. Muller
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Claire North
Design for How People Learn
Julie Dirksen
Make It Stick
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
Steve Brusatte
A New History of Life
Peter Ward, Joe Kirschvink
The Checklist Manifesto
Atul Gawande
On Tyranny
Timothy Snyder
Quiet
Susan Cain
The Fifth Discipline
Peter M. Senge
How to Think
Alan Jacobs
The Retreat of Western Liberalism
Edward Luce
Big World, Small Planet
Johan Rockstrom
The Lonely Man of Faith
Joseph B. Soloveitchik
The Story of Earth
Robert M. Hazen
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Big History
David Christian, Craig Benjamin, Cynthia Brown
Designing Voice User Interfaces
Cathy Pearl
Systems Thinking For Social Change
David Peter Stroh
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Speaker for the Dead
Orson Scott Card
The Elements of User Experience
Jesse James Garrett
Leaders Eat Last
Simon Sinek
Tribe
Sebastian Junger
Being Mortal
Atul Gawande
The Road to Character
David Brooks
Selected and Last Poems: 1931-2004
Czeslaw Milosz
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
Peak
Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
The Paradox of Choice
Barry Schwartz
The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama
The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg
Deep Work
Cal Newport
Competing Against Luck
Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David Duncan
Naked Statistics
Charles Wheelan
Just Enough Research
Erika Hall
Interviewing Users
Steve Portigal
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett, Dave Evans
Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes
E. Randolph Richards, Brandon J. O'Brien
How to Read a Book
Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango
The User Experience Team of One
Leah Buley
The Best Interface is No Interface
Golden Krishna
You Are What You Love
James K. A. Smith
Sprint
Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz
Usable Usability
Eric Reiss
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte
Don't Make Me Think
Steve Krug
On Writing Well
William Zinsser
Hooked
Nir Eyal
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
Steal Like an Artist
Austin Kleon
The Gifts of Imperfection
Breň Brown
Critical Thinking
Richard Paul, Linda Elder
Visual Design Solutions
Connie Malamed
Essentialism
Greg McKeown
Organizational Culture and Leadership
Edgar H. Schein
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon
Influencer
Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
Talent Is Overrated
Geoff Colvin
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The Progress Principle
Teresa Amabile, Steven Kramer
Never Eat Alone
Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz
Creativity, Inc.
Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
Leadership and Self-deception
Arbinger Institute
The 4 Disciplines of Execution
Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling