Rands Sitting on your desk

Books on Your Desk

Quick! List the set of books currently sitting on your desk:

– Management, Peter F. Drucker

– Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely

– Mythical Man Month, Frederick P. Brooks

– The Republic, Plato

– The Complete, Fully Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll

– Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder

– Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman

– Start-up, Jerry Kaplan

– Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

– The Klutz Book of Knots, John Cassidy

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25 Responses

  1. yojauta 22 years ago

    On my desk: none.

    In my reachable bookshelf:

    lots of assorted math and physics textbooks

    _The Emperor’s New Mind_ – Roger Penrose

    _Microserfs_ – Douglas Coupland

    I won’t bother to amazon linkify because LAST TIME I DID SO MY GOLD BOX GOT STUFFED FULL OF SEX TOYS AND I DID NOT APPRECIATE THAT

    Short reviews (but not summaries, you can google for those) of the books I listed:

    – Microserfs is probably my favorite work of modern fiction, but that’s just off the top of my head.

    – Penrose spends ~500 pages in ENM summarizing half the body of physics knowledge and then leaves ~20 pages for his “groundbreaking” hypothesis. It was written in ’88 and he penned a sequel (_The Shadows of the Mind_) in ’94 (?) which I picked up at the library, but haven’t had time to really start yet. It looks more like a second edition of ENM than a totally new sequel, however.

    Hurp.

  2. Axis 22 years ago

    Love Is Hell – Matt Groening

    School Is Hell – Matt Groening

    Confessions of Teenage Hackers – Dan Verton

    His Dark Materials Pt. 1-3 – Philip Pullman

    Redwall – Brian Jacques

    Pearls Of Lutra – Brian Jacques

    The Long Patrol – Brian Jacques

    Starcraft #1: Liberty’s Crusade – Jeff Grub

    Starcraft #3: Speed Of Darkness – Tracy Hickman

    Uncle Tungsten – Oliver Sacks

    Unix For Dummies

    FreeBSD Manual

    The Pelican Brief – John Grisham

    Zebra – Clark Howard

  3. Stonewall Jackson 22 years ago

    HOW TO SAY IT IN HUNGARIAN (Tankonyvkiado)

    Old but probably still useful.

    JOY OF COOKING (Rombauer / Rombauer Becker)

    Only cookbook you’ll ever need.

    DESIGNING FOR CHILDREN (Heller / Guarnaccia)

    Piece of shit, almost 100 days overdue

    THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (Thomas Mann)

    Long but excellent. Try to read it in a week or two, no more. Do it as fast as possible. It’s as dense and enjoyable as Death in Venice.

    INTERACTION OF COLOR (Albers)

    Useful, a bit Goethey in the language

    DESIGNERS GUIDE TO COLOR (Stockton)

    Limited but useful (lots of color combinations)

    RENDERING WITH MARKERS (Kemnitzer)

    Excellent resource on doing one particular style of rendering. Very practical, good illustrations.

    MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE – ESSAYS (MONTAIGNE)

    Fun to read

    1800 WOODCUTS BY THOMAS BEWICK (Dover Clipart)

    Dover clipart libraries are amazing. I have a bunch of them.

    DESIGNER’S NOTEBOOK (Bockus)

    Very nitty gritty type thing on production and things like that. Slightly overblown.

    SWANN’S WAY (Proust)

    Ever have one of those “I’M GAY” epiphanies? I just did.

    DELL TRUEMOBILE MANUAL

    Useless documentation in the Dell tradition. Having said that, I love wireless internet. Having 400Kb/s on your lap is a nice feeling.

    Dude you people are dorks.

  4. Stonewall Jackson 22 years ago

    There’s one book that ISN’T on my desk that I would LIKE TO HAVE on my desk. I think you KNOW WHAT BOOK THAT IS. Seriously get that thing printed, I’ll order a dozen.

  5. Hachibambatar 22 years ago

    Commutative Rings by M. Artin

    Algebraic Number Theory by Frohlich and Taylor

    Valuation Theory by O. Endler

    Modules and Group Algebras by Jon F. Carlson

    Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

    The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs

    Categories for the Working Mathematician by Saunders MacLane

    Neuromancer by William Gibson

  6. shrike 22 years ago

    Nothing on my desk, but on the floor between my bed and the desk:

    Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

    Kill Your Boyfriend – Grant Morrison (do comics count?)

    The Tao Te Ching, Brian Browne Walker Translation

    The Tao Te Ching, James Legge Translation

    Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid – Douglas R. Hofstadter

    The Life and Times of Rasputin – Penny Stempel

    Luminous – Greg Egan

    Virtual Light – William Gibson

    The Mind of God – Paul Davies

    The Book of Nothing – John D. Barrow

    Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

    The Elegant Universe – Brian Greene

  7. chaz 22 years ago

    You get to read at work, huh?! cheeky prick

  8. JayBees 22 years ago

    Pastwatch – Orson Scott Card

    Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics – Ralph Grimaldi (It makes a great mousepad)

    Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

    Naked – David Sedaris

    Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond

    Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – Douglas R. Hofstadter

    The Fermata – Nicholson Baker

    Call It Sleep – Henry Roth (The Jewish Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

    Codes, Ciphers & Other Cryptic & Clandestine Communication – Fred B. Rixon

    Microserfs – Douglas Coupland

    Learning Perl – Randal Schwartz & Tom Phoenix

  9. Ryvar 22 years ago

    PHP And PostgreSQL Advanced Web Programming – Geschwinde & Schonig

    C++ How To Program – Deitel & Deitel (got caught on a stupid precision error)

    Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – Hofstadter (that makes 3 of us in a row)

    and the Master of Orion 3 strat guide waiting for Wednesday.

  10. Stonewall Jackson 22 years ago

    Uh…I don’t know how to say this but my copy of GEB was behind the turntable. So that makes 4. RICERCAR.

  11. Serfer 22 years ago

    All these are on my desk. What a dork.

    Wisdom of the Buddha – Siddartha

    Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus

    The Republic – Plato

    Billions and Billions – Carl Sagan

    The Analects – Confucious

    Civil Disobedience and Other Essays – Thoreau

    Utopia – More

    Shanghai Baby – Wei Hui

    The Metamorphosis and Other Stories – Kafka

  12. nil 22 years ago

    1000 Play Thinks – Ivan Moscovich

    The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying – Sogyal Rinpoche

    Hunter S. Thompson – The Proud Highway

    Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstacy – Rudolph Grey

    Yoga for Beginners – Mark Ansari and Liz Lark

    It Was a Dark and Stormy Night – Scott Rice

    No One Lives Forever 2 manual – some guy

    Red Hat Linux Bible – Christopher Negus

    Jerkcity: BIG, STIFF (ALSO UNCUT) – Rands, Pants, Spigot, Deuce, Atandt, Ozone, Net (rare test print)

  13. tito 22 years ago

    CURRENT BOOKS: THE JOY OF COOKING

    CURRENT MUSIC: AVRIL LAVIGNE!!! JEW SKATER CHIX R00L

    CURRENT SEX: HARDCORE ANAL W/ CLEANUP BLOWJOBS

  14. Spacelegoman 22 years ago

    I don’t sit at a desk. But on my table at home next to my bed are:

    Mary Ann Caws: Manifesto, a Century of ism’s — which is very interesting if you like the history of ideas. It basically collects all the written manifestos of the various artistic movements of the 20th Century.

    and

    Mark Prendergast: The Ambient Century — which is about the evolution of ambient music from the early 12-tone classical composers in the 1900’s to today. He’s somewhat vague about what ambient music actually IS, but he has lots of information about obscure 60’s psych and folk bands, along with lots of other good stuff.

  15. shrike 22 years ago

    I’m noticing a pattern here: sci-fi, Eastern philosophy, technical books, and cosmology popularisations. Ladies and gentlemen, we are geeks. The next question is what music is everyone listening to? If anyone says Dream Theater, then it’s pretty much case closed on the geek question.

  16. sisko 22 years ago

    CURRENT READING: THE ANNOTATED HEPJOURNAL VOLS I-IV

  17. Klaatu 22 years ago

    hmm, what’s on my draftuing table / desk :

    A bunch of X ray crystallography books from the library

    McCrone’s Microscopy Book – Cool, OOP and no new editions – RIP man!

    Peter S. Beagle’s thoughtful book on Heironymous Bosch and the garden of Earthly Delight, OOP and a great coffee table book.

    Take on the Street by Arthur Levitt

    teach Yourself Visually microsoft office 2000

    (or Microsoft for Martians)

    Pease & Luv,

  18. stray 22 years ago

    Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany

    The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton

    The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson

    Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (recently finished)

    Notes From Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    The Zap Gun, by Philip K. Dick

    The Man Who Japed, by Philip K. Dick

    Fences and Windows, by Naomi Klein

    Simulation and Simulacra, by Jean Beaudrillard

    (there are still more, but I think you get the idea that I read a fucking hella lot.)

  19. Klaatu 22 years ago

    Dear Shrike & Rands;

    hmmmm, music:

    anything from Hearts of Space:

    http://www.hos.com/radio.html

    and echoes:

    http://www.echoes.org

    and Brian Eno.

    Proud to be a Geek..;-)

    Peace,

  20. dord 22 years ago

    There someone goes changing the frickin’ topic. Well screw theat. Here’s what’s on my desk.

    Acts of the Apostles and Cheap Complex Devices by John Sundman

    TCP/IP Network Administration (alas, 2nd ed) by Craig Hunt

    the Onion’s Ad Nauseum

    Knights of the Dinner Table: Tales from the Vault Vol 3 by Jolly Blackburn

    Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System

    Paranoia (2nd ed) by West End Games

    Since I’ve finished GEB (and also Metamagical Themas) they’re on the bookshelf, not the desk.

  21. Ed 22 years ago

    Oh yeah??

    The Ruined Map – Kobo Abe

    Fish Tales – Nettie Jones

    Invisible Monsters, Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk

    Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

    Mysteries – Knut Hamsun

    The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

    The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

    The Decameron – Boccaccio (does he even have a first name?)

    Perhaps “elitist bastard” would better fit some of us.

  22. tom 22 years ago

    i vote for PRETENTIOUS FUCKING PRICKS

  23. shrike 22 years ago

    Maybe we just crave a little something more than David Eddings or Robert Ludlum?

    Okay, I think that was my vote for “elitist bastard.”

  24. cat 22 years ago

    fashionably late..

    best new horror 4 – edited by stephen jones and ramsey campbell

    memory and dream – charles de lint

    and if magazines count..

    idn magazine volume 9 issue 4

    newtype usa feb 2003

    also a notebook labled.. wait for it.. “notes”.

  25. shiloh 20 years ago

    Chronicles of Narnia books 1-7