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How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Stewart Brand
Matthew Bennett
A great approachable book about the built environment and how we shape it
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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
Hands-down, this is the best comprehensive work on the human condition EVER composed. Jared Diamond is a genius of rare stature and is extremely learned across vast disciplines.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
Eric Hodgins
Anyone possessed by the fantasy of finding the perfect house in the country, or by the urge to restore a somewhat-less-than-perfect one, or by the inspiration to construct a dream dwelling from scratch, would do well to read this savagely funny novel as a cautionary fable before going any further. F...show more
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster
Like many kids, Milo, the protagonist of Norton Juster’s quick-witted fantasy, is chronically bored. Until the day, that is, when a mysterious package appears in his room without explanation. What follows is one of the most exuberant, clever, silly, mind-bending, and joyous expeditions in children’s...show more
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Within the catalog of books to read before you die, there is a very short list of books to read between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and On the Road is certainly near its top. Jack Kerouac’s novel has qualities that transcend its youthful appeal, but none measures up to the intoxication it can de...show more
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is near the top of the list of most-beloved American novels. Set in Depression-era Alabama, it is the story of six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout; her older brother, Jeremy, nicknamed Jem; and their father, Atticus Finch, a middle-aged lawyer who...show more
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
Re-writing the History taught to us in School.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The Road starts simply enough: A father and son, waking after a night camping in the wilderness, prepare to journey onward. But we’re soon aware that the simplicity belongs to no pastoral idyll—the sky is endlessly gray, the rivers are the color of oil, and ash drips from above. Nearly all plants an...show more
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, but crisscrossing time and space in an intricate series of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave raising the children she led out of Kentucky. She is tormented by what she has escaped and haunted by what she cannot: the me...show more
Holy Land
D. J. Waldie
This book is a remarkable paradox: One of the quirkiest, most original, most poignant books published in the 1990s, its inspiration springs from the blandest of muses—the American suburb. And not the affluently disenchanted sort of community whose emotional tangles have been so lovingly conjured by ...show more
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Having been a printer’s assistant, teacher, and newspaperman in New York and New Orleans, in 1855 a largely self-taught and unknown man named Walt Whitman self-published—not just footing the bill but designing the cover and setting the type—a small book called Leaves of Grass. Containing twelve unti...show more