My first attempt at a ‘connected reading list’. I like to read factual books and often find myself jumping from one subject area to the next either through direct quotation, a reference or bibliography entry, a reviewer’s comment or simply from a Google search. If you hover your mouse pointer over the photo I’ve added notes which are links to each title on Amazon.co.uk
Working up the stack we start with
– Joe McNally’s The Moment It Clicks; Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters. He takes an interesting approach and it reads somewhere between a heavily illustrated autobiography and a how-to manual and that, somehow, is a perfect combination! (I found this and the next two from Thom Hogan’s excellent Nikon centric website)
– Light Science and Magic. So you like taking photographs? This is the book that explains all about why light itself acts the way it does.
– Out of the Blue, So you like taking photographs or you just enjoy being outside! Read this great book to get an understanding on the weather and its visual phenomenon.
– A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The title says it all – A huge undertaking that Bryson pulls off with aplomb. Get some sense of scale. This should be required reading for everybody!
– Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative is my favourite book on displaying information by Tufte.
– Universal Principles of Design is a collection of 125 design concepts draw from a wide range of disciplines from graphic design to architecture to user-interface design.
– Security Engineering by Ross Anderson is THE book on the subject. Most engineers in any field spend their time trying to get things to work well, Security Engineers need to spend their time thinking about how to break things. This book looks at everything from Cash Machines to Nuclear Command and Control, Door Locks to Cryptography and reminds you that you are only as secure as the weakest link.
– A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Despite appearances this actually has more pages than Anderson’s Security tome. The title refers to a structured method of describing good design practices within Architecture, however it has been applied to numerous other fields since. If our modern era planning control adopted more of these ‘patterns’ we would live in far more pleasant built environs.
– Patterns of Home is a distillation of the domestic scale patterns suggested by Alexander et al in Pattern Language by two of the original collaborators, Silverstein and Jacobson, based on their experiences of applying them to houses over years of architectural practice.
– The Housebuilder’s Bible by Mark Brinkley is how to Self-Build you own house in the UK.
– Designing a house to build inevitable brings you around to considering energy usage and supply. Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air looks at this challenge on an individual household, national and global level, considering energy use and how to reduce it and energy supply options.
– A Place of My Own is the story of one man’s desire to build his own space, in this case a writing studio. A fascinating narrative.
– Rich Dad, Poor Dad. At first and probably second glance the odd one out in this stack. It is over simplistic, over familiar, over American and a lot of what it details is common sense or should be. However the more financial titles I read the more I find myself coming back to it and re-reading it with modified perspectives.
– The Long and The Short of It: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren’t in the Industry is a perfect antidote to the financial services industry and mainstream press personal finance output. The book to read if you don’t trust the banking and investment industry and suspect you could probably do a better job yourself. It suggests you probably can and tells you how.
Posted by TypicallyStuart on 2012-12-28 23:29:42
Tagged: , Connected , Reading List , Pattern Language , interdisciplinary , Books , Book Stack , John Kay , The Long and The Short of It , Rich Dad, Poor Dad , A place of my own , Sustainable Energy , Michael Pollan , Kiyosaki , Housebuilder’s Bible , Mark Brinkley , Patterns of Home , A Pattern Language , Security Engineering , Universal Principles of Design , Ross Anderson , Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything , Naylor , Out of the Blue , Light Science & Magic , The Moment It Clicks , Joe McNally , McNally , Visual Explainations , Tufte , Lidwell , Alexander , Jacobson , Silverstein , Interconnected , Good book , Great Books , Design , autodidact , science
