Book List

I started tracking these books in 2021, inspired by Paul Dourish's book list.

Reading Now:

  • Geeky Pedagogy by Jessamyn Neuhaus

Finished in 2024:

  • Neuromancer by William Gibson (I'll be honest I didn't fully get the hype but I'm excited for the Apple TV adaptation)
  • The Evolved Nest by Darcia Narvaez and G. A. Bradshaw
  • Democracy Matters by Cornel West
  • What Kind of Creatures Are We? by Noam Chomsky
  • Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
  • Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz
  • Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks
  • How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching by Joshua R. Eyler

Finished in 2023:

  • The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle
  • No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz
  • Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis
  • Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
  • On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers
  • American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (source material for the film)
  • The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
  • Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
  • Contact by Carl Sagan
  • Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
  • Designing your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
  • Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  • The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry (hoopla audiobook read by Nick Offerman 🙂)
  • The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
  • Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway
  • Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
  • Information Ecologies: Using Technology With Heart by Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki O'Day

Finished in 2022:

  • The Master Switch by Tim Wu
  • An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
  • Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
  • Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz
  • Digital Disconnect by Robert W. McChesney
  • The New Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian
  • The Upswing by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett
  • Chasing Innovation by Lilly Irani
  • The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
  • Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
  • Misogynoir Transformed by Moya Bailey
  • All the News That’s Fit to Click by Caitlin Petre
  • Technopoly by Neil Postman
  • The Engaged Scholar by Andrew Hoffman

Finished in 2021:

  • Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar
  • Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
  • The Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
  • If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore
  • Thinking in Systems: a Primer by Donella Meadows
  • We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
  • Your Computer is on Fire (Essay Collection)
  • Black Software by Charlton McIlwain
  • Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro
  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  • The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
  • Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang
  • Wintering by Katherine May
  • Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
  • Pasteur's Quadrant by Donald E. Stokes
  • The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
  • Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

"Mentor Books" and Other Favorites:

This is not an endorsement of all the authors' opinions or ideas, just an acknowledgment that they have stuck with me:

  • Thinking in Systems: a Primer by Donella Meadows
  • Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
  • In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan
  • Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein
  • Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
  • Technology and the Virtues by Shannon Vallor
  • Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble
  • Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  • Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
  • The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Books On My List to Read (No Particular Order):

  • The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America by Leo Marx
  • Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life by Jonathan Silvertown
  • The Infinite Playground: A Player's Guide to Imagination by Bernard De Koven with Holly Gramazio
  • Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America by Michael B. Katz
  • The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now by Hilke Schellmann
  • Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being by Neil Theise
  • The Optimist's Telescope by Bina Venkataraman
  • The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric
  • The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • The Vegetarian by Han Kang
  • Failure to Disrupt by Justin Reich
  • What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
  • Truth Decay by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich
  • Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time by Linda Nilson
  • How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas
  • Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy by Sarrah Kassem
  • Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures by Christina Dunbar-Hester
  • Why Privacy Matters by Neil Richards
  • The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
  • Dying for an iPhone by Jenny Chan
  • The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
  • When You Wonder, You're Learning by Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski
  • Destination Dissertation by Sonja K. Foss
  • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
  • Breaking the Social Media Prism by Chris Bail
  • Machine Habitus by Massimo Airoldi
  • Everyday Information Architecture by Lisa maria Martin
  • The Damned Don't Cry by Frank Chapman
  • No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey
  • The Rise of Big Data Policing by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
  • After Democracy: Imagining Our Political Future by Zizi Papacharissi
  • Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
  • The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott
  • Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology by Tara Dawson McGuinness
  • The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business by Duff McDonald
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
  • Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City by Jane Jacobs
  • The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
  • Predict and Surveil by Sarah Brayne
  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  • Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
  • The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser
  • Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
  • Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson
  • Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant
Photo by Jason Wong / Unsplash