Books and Reading
Last updated
Last updated
Until I fill this out properly, my Goodreads list.
Honestly, I think books are some of the most personal things and have an incredibly high degree of contextual differing which means that any given recommendation will be wildly different at hitting certain people in certain ways at certain times. Books I've read as a youth are boring or bad advice or hilariously wrong to me now. Books I tried to read as a kid but hated or abandoned might be more applicable to me now. Books that my friend has read won't apply to me, books that I love won't apply to you. Books are deep dots and often don't seem relevant at all until much later, or through some other lens. It's tricky.
So, here's a list in no particular order, as I think of them, but I hesitate to ever call it some sort of 'best' list or even a recommendation list. I don't know what you need, what you're hungry for.
This is one of those contentious ones that I recommend to very few, select people.
I read it in my first year of design college, sitting on a specific wooden bench on a path in front of a pond in a park a few blocks north of the campus. I used to longboard there after class and sit as the sun set around me, longer and warmer every day as winter turned to spring.
It's a book about quality, and Quality, and at the time I was studying to be an industrial designer so the idea that objects have these souls and attitudes and we as humans interact with them whether we realize it or not was a deeply formative idea for me then. It's about humbleness and seeing the mundane and thriving to work in that medium and make it better. About simplicity and order and that indescribable niceness that certain designs have, a certain elegance of solution.
It's also very long and sort of a slog and I'm not even sure it was very good in hindsight, I wonder what I'd think of it to read it again now. But at the time it was exactly what I needed.
In similar era and vein, Dieter Rams was an iconic industrial designer and a pure-white bible of essays about industrial design in both German and English is about as on brand as you could get at the time.
I don't remember a lot of them, but I loved the idea that you could wax philosophical about some obscure bowl or something, because that format of obsession over invisible details was supposed to be our life.
Be helpful.
Be thoughtful.
