Last year, in the midst of moving across the country, adjusting to New York, and starting school, I didn’t, unlike my normal habit, read much. In fact I read exactly 13 books. This year, however, things were quite different. I spent a few hundred hours by myself in the dark shooting a stop motion film; I had a summer of semi-idle working part time for artists; I commuted by foot every day for 45 minutes or more. The result was a lot more reading of physical books, digital books, and audio books. In the end I read more than three times as many books this year as last year for a total of 43.
Looking back over the list now, I see a couple of themes. There’s a cluster of older sci-fi titles that I’d always meant to get around to reading: All Tomorrow’s Parties, Singularity Sky, Zodiac, The Lathe of Heaven, etc. There’s a bunch of special effects-related books, a long-standing and fast-growing aesthetic, theoretical, and practical interest of mine that’s becoming more and more central for me through my work at ITP: The Making of Star Wars, Filming the Fantastic, From Vatican to Vegas, Filming the Future. There’s an increasing amount of tech history (Engelbart Hypothesis, JCR Licklider and the Dream Machine, etc.) again relating to my ITP thesis work. And there’s a smattering of art-related writing: I revisited Dave Hickey’s classic Air Guitar on the occasion of the re-release of his long-out-of-print and controversial Invisible Dragon. Following the lead of John Powers I dove deeply into Robert Smithson’s writing and thought.
Anyway, here they are, more or less in the order that I read them:
- The Atrocity Archive by Charlie Stross
- The Jennifer Morgue by Charlie Stross
- The Big Short by Michael Lewis
- The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
- All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson
- The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto
- Singularity Sky by Charlie Stross
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
- You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier
- Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
- Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey (reread)
- Point Omega by Don DeLillo
- The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty by Dave Hickey
- Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean and Timothy Hursley
- The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster
- Cognitive Surplus Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky
- The Big U by Neal Stephenson
- Liar’s Poker Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street by Michael Lewis
- What The Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer by John Markoff (reread)
- Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings
- The Fuller Memorandum by Charlie Stross
- Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton
- Star Wars Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn
- Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art Career by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber
- A Century of Stop Motion Animation: From Melies to Aardman by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton
- The Making of Star Wars by JW Rinzler
- The Making of Empire Strikes Back by JW Rinzler
- How To Start and Run a Commercial Gallery by Edward Winkleman
- The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas by Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg
- Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (reread)
- Au Revoir To All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France by Michael Steinberger
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
- Listen To This by Alex Ross
- Filming the Fantastic: A Guide to Visual Effects Cinematography by Mark Sawicki
- How To Build Dioramas by Shepherd Paine
- 2001: Filming The Future by Piers Bizony
- From The Vatican To Vegas: The History of Special Effects by Norman Klein
- The Art of 3d Computer Animation and Effects by Isaac Kerlow
- An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
- Shopgirl by Steve Martin
- The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
- The Lord of The Rings by JRR Tolkein