Kim's Reading List


Stuff I'm reading now...

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor. David S. Landes
Fingersmith. Sarah Waters
Gulliver's Travels. Jonathan Swift
Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations. John F. Sowa
The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf (There are 6 volumes--I flip around every few months)
Various papers in Computer Science, usually concentrated in requirements engineering and reliability engineering, but lately in forensics

Stuff I've read recently...

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line. Neal Stephenson
Fatal Defect. Ivars Peterson
Human Error. James Reason
Design Paradigms. Henry Petroski
Normal Accidents. Charles Perrow
Safeware. Nancy Leveson
Fall on Your Knees. Ann-Marie MacDonald
Memoirs of a Geisha. Arthur Golden.
Fast Food Nation. Eric Schlosser
Prisoner's Dilemma. Richard Powers
Moo. Jane Smiley
Roots. Alex Haley
The Conspiracy of Ignorance: the Failure of American Public Schools. Martin L. Gross
Gifted Children. Ellen Winner
Spinners. Anthony McCarten
The Runaway Jury. John Grisham
Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas. Dave Parnas
An Instance of the Fingerpost. Iain Pears
Bridget Jones' Diary. Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Helen Fielding
An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. F. Ungerer and H.J. Schmid
Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Ronald W. Langacker
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Frederick Brooks (Note: this rotates back in periodically. Sooo many lessons.)
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
The Testament. John Grisham
An Introduction to Formal Specification and Z. Ben Potter, Jane Sinclair and David Till
Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. Michael Garey and David Johnson
The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger.
Lawnboy. Paul Lisicky.
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Melissa Bank.
The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrisson
Summer Sisters. Judy Blume
Miss Manners' Basic Training: The Right Thing to Say. Judith Martin
The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography. Simon Singh
Molecular Cell Biology. Harvey Lodish, et. al.
Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. John Holland
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. Melanie Mitchell
Flowers for Algernon. Daniel Keyes
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. John Hennessy and David Patterson
The Gold Bug Variations. Richard Powers
    ...(among the Greatest Hits, below)
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. Paul Rabinow
Foucault's Pendulum. Umberto Eco
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Douglas Hofstadter
    ...(among the Greatest Hits, below)
Canone Inverso. Paolo Maurensig
The Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges
How Proust Can Change Your Life. Alain de Botton
Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Michael Sipser
Concepts of Programming Languages. William Sebesta
She's Come Undone. Wally Lamb
Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand
Strange Pilgrims. Gabriel García Márquez
The Story of B. Daniel Quinn
How the Mind Works. Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct. Steven Pinker
Paradigms Lost: Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science. John Casti
Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Ray Jackendoff
Semantics and Cognition. Ray Jackendoff
A Tour of the Calculus. David Berlinski
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. George Lakoff

Stuff on deck...

Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared Diamond
The Other Boleyn Girl. Philippa Gregory
The Name of the Rose. Umberto Eco
Gravity's Rainbow. Thomas Pynchon.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Rebecca Wells
The Mind's I. Douglas Hofstadter
Shadows of the Mind Roger Penrose
Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers. Gullberg, Jan
A Brief History of Everything. Ken Wilber
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Thomas Kuhn
The Elm and the Expert. Jerry Fodor
Consciousness Explained. Daniel Dennett

Stuff I never finished...but swear I'll come back to

American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Thomas P. Hughes
Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective. Edsger W. Dijkstra
The Art of the Personal Essay. Philip Lopate
The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. Andrew Tobias
Selected Papers in Computer Science. Donald Knuth
The Cerebral Code. William Calvin
Sewer, Gas, and Electric. Matt Ruff
The Emperor's New Mind. Roger Penrose
The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Ray Jackendoff
The Unknowable. Gregory Chaitin
Distributed Operating Systems. Andrew Tanenbaum

Greatest Hits...

The Gold Bug Variations. Richard Powers
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Douglas Hofstadter
Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Griffin and Sabine. Nick Bantock

[In the works: an annotated bibliography of CS papers]
[Also in the works: an annotated catalog of my personal library]
[Check out John Regehr's pretty amazing book pages]
[Go home] ...last updated 05/11/03