The Books I Read Last Year (2005)
So, this is the list of books read during the year, which I usually post in December, but I’ve been busy. (I’ll mix books in English and Swedish.)
- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn
- Sylvia Nasar A Beautiful Mind (as audiobook)
- Shan Sa, The Girl Who Played Go
- Edwin Abbot Abbot, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (audiobook; available freely online)
- Matthew Linderman & Jason Fried, Defensive Design for the Web
- David Allen, Getting Things Done
- Richard Appignanesi & Chris Garrat, Postmodernism for Beginners
- Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (audiobook)
- Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained (second, completely revised edition)
- Jeff Collins & Bill Mayblin, Derrida for Beginners
- David Allen, Ready for Anything (audiobook)
- Jan Kjærstad, Tecken till kärlek (AdLibris, Bokus)
- V. S. Naipaul, Att läsa och skriva (AdLibris, Bokus in English, Reading & Writing: A Personal Account)
- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (except in Swedish; Kavalier & Clays fantastiska äventyr, Bokus, Adlibris)
- Mike Mason, Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion
- Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (except as audiobook)
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi (audiobook)
- Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Pragmatic Unit Testing Using JUnit
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (audiobook)
- Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (in Swedish, Sommarboken; Bokus, Adlibris)
- Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (a very quick scan, not sure that it qualifies as “finished”)
- Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife (as audiobook)
- Neil Fiore, The Now Habit
- Paul Auster, Oracle Night
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (audiobook)
- Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices
- Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (the audiobook version)
- Robert Bringhurst, Elements of Typographic Style
- Dave Thomas & David Heinemeier Hansson, Agile Web Development with Rails
- Gunnar Törnqvist, Kreativitetens geografi (Bokus, AdLibris)
- Göran Hägg, Nya författarskolan (AdLibris, Bokus)
- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics
- Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation
If I were to recommend two fiction books and two non-fiction books, I guess those would be; fiction:
- Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (if the 800 pages scare you, the audiobook is brilliantly read by Simon Prebble), and
- Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Non-fiction:
- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, and
- David Allen, Getting Things Done.
(If you’re a procrastinator like I am, you probably should read Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit after Allen’s book.)