Paul

Reading is one of my great pleasures in life. I take time, every day if possible, to read, even if it’s only just a few minutes. It’s relaxing, expands my mind and my library of experiences and provides a much-needed challenge to my ideas and values.

Way back when, I took a course in speed reading – but really it was just about speed-skimming and not very satisfying at all. I read pretty slowly, but slow and steady wins the race.

Below is an ever-incomplete, always-updated list of fiction and non-fiction that has made a difference in my life. Give a few titles a try! Many thanks to Jess Bybee for requesting this and forcing me to organize this resource and get it posted!

Fiction

7th Sigma
Steven Gould

Age of Madness Series (trilogy)
Joe Abercrombie

American Gods
Neil Gaiman

The Armageddon Rag
George R.R. Martin

Company of Liars
Karen Maitland

Constellation Games
Leonard Richardson

Crooked Little Vein
Warren Ellis

Dandelion Wine
Ray Bradbury

The Doomsday Book
Connie Willis

The Drowned Cities
Paolo Bacigalupi

Easy in the Islands
Bob Shacochis

Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You: Stories
Fred Chappell

Feed (Newsflesh Trilogoy)
Mira Grant

Fiend
Peter Stenson

The First Law Series (trilogy)
Joe Abercrombie

Freaky Deaky
Elmore Leonard

Gold Bug Variations
Richard Powers

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett

Greasy Lake and Other Stories
T. Coraghessan Boyle

I Am One of You Forever
Fred Chappell

Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

Junky
William S. Burroughs

Kitchens of the Great Midwest
J. Ryan Stradal

The Lady in the Lake
Raymond Chandler

The Last Good Kiss
James Crumly

Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America
Brian Francis Slattery

Liminal States
Zach Parsons

Little Brother
Cory Doctorow

The Long Goodbye
Raymond Chandler

The Milkweed Triptych
Ian Trellis

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Bruce Sterling (editor)

Neuromancer trilogy
William Gibson

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

On Stranger Tides
Tim Powers

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Orson Scott Card

The Peripheral
William Gibson

Playing For Keeps
Mur Lafferty

Ready Player One
Ernest Cline

River of Gods
Ian McDonald

Sandman Slim novels
Richard Kadrey

Shipbreaker
Paolo Bacigalupi

The Simple Art of Murder
Raymond Chandler

Speaker for the Dead (need to read Ender’s Game first)
Orson Scott Card

Songs of Fire and Ice
George R.R. Martin

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Richard Powers

Time and Again
Jack Finney

The Twenty Year Death
Ariel Winter

Too Like the Lightning
Ada Palmer

Under the Poppy
Kathe Koja

The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi

Non-Fiction

Architecture: Form, Space, Order
Francis Chin

American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields
Rowan Jacobsen

Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us
Maggie Koerth-Baker

Brain Rules
John Medina

Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism
Richard C. Longworth

The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson

The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams

The Elegant Universe
Brian Greene

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
James Gleick

Getting Things Done
David Allen

The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell

How Music Works
David Byrne

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
James Gleick

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
Dana Boyd

Justinian’s Flea
William Rosen

Kitchen Confidential
Anthony Bourdain

Life
Keith Richards

The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Michael Pollan

Parallel Worlds
Michio Kaku

Reality is Broken
Jane McGonigal

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
Richard Feynman

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin

Theodore Roosevelt biography trilogy
Edmund Morris

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
Jared Diamond

Zeitoun
Dave Eggers

If you are interested, like I am, in game development, writing and psychology, here is the great “Game Designer’s Bookshelf” list from the Game Designer’s Workshop: http://boffo.us/gdw/BookshelfByTopic.html.

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Those of you who have visited us may remember our odd little “Duck Eggs for Sale” hand-painted sign on weathered barn board. Well, there’s a story there…

That sign lived at my Mom’s house until her death in 2008, when I adopted it and placed it in our kitchen.

So we have to go back quite a few decades for the story. Back in the late 1950s, my mom and dad, along with a few other friends, started the Park Ridge Sports Car Club (or PRSCC as we all called it) in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.

The club was a home for car enthusiasts who loved to drive and every month, a committee of members would put on a road rally. In those days, it was basically a scavenger hunt on the twisty back-country roads of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

Each car would have a driver and a navigator, and they’d be given a set of instructions to figure out along the way. It would also give them average speeds and such. There’s be instructions like “Turn left at second opportunity after SRIP ‘cowbell'” or “CAST 43mph”.

SRIP means “sign reading in part.” CAST means “Change Average Speed To.” So you’d have your navigator looking out for clues, and you’d try to stay on course. Along the route (it’d take maybe three hours in total), there would be random checkpoints where spotters would time your car to see how “on target” you were. Any seconds ahead or behind schedule earned the team penalty points.

If you missed a clue or got lost, you’d have to backtrack, but you’d have to go FAST, because you are trying to maintain a precise average speed and stay right on time. I remember my Mom and Dad having this huge clipboard for my Mom to navigate with – there were counters, two stop watches, a Stevens (a mechanical calculator to determine average speeds), roadmaps and the clues.

At the end of the day, the teams would meet at a restaurant for drinks, food and to swap war stories. At the end of the night, they’d give out trophies and dash plaques for the participants. Man, did my mom and dad win a lot of trophies! After my Dad died in ’77, my Mom and I tried to compete (with me as the navigator) – we were terrible!

While most rally committees were ad-hoc, one was a standing committee: the March Committee. Both Mom and Dad were on that – and my eventual stepdad Bob (there’s another story there!). The committee was infamous for designing the hardest, most challenging rallies imaginable – brutal affairs that required a keen eye and crazy driving skills.

Once, in the early 60s (before I was born), one of the March Committee rally clues was “Turn right after SRIP ‘Duck Eggs for Sale'”. Before the rally was run by contestants (usually on a Sunday), the committee would go out on Saturday and run the course – to make sure everything was still in good shape. During this particular drive through, the Duck Eggs sign was gone!

Former but not yet stepdad Bob grabbed some wood and black paint quickly created a replacement sign and nailed it to a tree so the clues would still work.

Then, every year after that, the March Committee would have one clue using that Duck Eggs sign, and the dozens of holes in it attest to how many trees and telephone poles it was nailed upon over the next 25+ years.

So that little sign hangs in our kitchen – reminding me of that awesome club my dad founded that survived for close to 30 years and gave me some of my best family memories. Now that sign is close to sixty years old – I wonder if our kids will ever ask us what it means?

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