When I clean the house I often get stuck leafing through some book that I’m supposed to put in its right place. Cleaning, therefore, can take a while. The other day we were cleaning out a closet, and I found my copy of Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained, and I realized that there are many books in its annotated bibliography that seem interesting:

• Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, by Leonard Koren. Wabi and sabi are two Japanese aesthetic principles, seen in, for instance, haiku poetry and “Zen painting”. Koren, says its back cover, “was trained as an architect but never built anything – except an eccentric Japanese tea house – because he found large, permanent objects too philosophically vexing to design.”
• Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Kent Beck writes, “More good discussion of metaphors and thinking. Also, the description of how metaphors blend together to form wholly new metaphors is like what is happening in software engineering thought. The old metaphors drawn from civil engineering, mathematics, and so on are slowly becoming a uniquely software engineering metaphor.”
• The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Kent Beck writes, “Describes how the team structure at Disney evolved over the years to deal with changing business and technology.”

There is more, but these are the ones that are related to what I’m interested in for the moment.