Hurricane Katrina destroyed many things in our home, the greatest loss for me being nearly all of my 400+ volume library. I worked very long and hard to build that collection and it was the physical representation of my autodidactic being. I'll never really replace the library but I've already started to construct its replacement. So far I'm up to about 25 40 titles.
Here's what I need to complete a basic foundation of my most essential books:
Novels:
A Good Old Fashioned Future – Bruce Sterling
A Place So Foreign – Cory Doctorow
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
The Baroque Cycle – Neal Stephenson
Borges: Selected Fictions and Selected Non-Fictions
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Crash – J.G. Ballard
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Crystal Express – Bruce Sterling
The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
Distraction – Bruce Sterling
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – Cory Doctorow
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Islands in the Net – Bruce Sterling
Lolita – Nabakov
The Man in the High Tower – Philip K. Dick
The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Garcia Marquez
Pattern Recognition – Bruce Sterling
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
Schizmatrix - Bruce Sterling
Snowcrash – Neal Stephenson
Still Life with a Woodpecker – Tom Robbins
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
UBIK – Philip K. Dick
Ulysses - James Joyce
V For Vendetta – Alan Moore
Virtual Light – William Gibson
Watchmen – Alan Moore
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Advertising:
The Cluetrain Manifesto
My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising - Claude Hopkins
Ogilvy on Advertising - David Ogilvy
Architecture/Urbanism:
Architecture & Disjunction – Tschumi
Breathing Cities – Nick Barley
Flesh – Diller + Scofidio
Mutations – Koolhaas, et al.
Graphic Design:
Grid Systems in Graphic Design – Muller-Brockmann
History of Graphic Design – Meggs
Life Style – Bruce Mau
Theory:
A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History – Manuel De Landa
America – Jean Baudrillard
The Anti-Aesthetic by Hal Foster
The Arcades Project – Walter Benjamin
Capitalism & Schizophrenia Vol I & II – Deleuze & Guattari
Capital Volume I – Karl Marx
Empire – Negri & Hardt
Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers – Lechte
Illuminations – Walter Benjamin
Introducing Critical Theory
The Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
PopTech:
The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil
Blink - Malcom Gladwell
Cradle to Cradle
Emergence - Stephen Johnson
Freakonomics - Leavitt & Dubner
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Tomorrow Now - Bruce Sterling
The Wisdom of Crowds
Art:
Art in Theory: 1900-2000
Art Since 1900 – Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, et al.
Conceptual Art
Constructivism – George Rickey
Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins
The Duchamp Effect
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths – Rosalind Krauss
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art
Programming/Computation/Tech:
Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional - W. J. Gilmore
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition - Eric A. Meyer
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville
PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution - Chris Lea, et al
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook - Dan Cederholm
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