My Ongoing Book Wish List

This is a constantly-updated list of books I’m interested in, but may not be able to buy myself. It may seem odd that I would ask you to buy stuff to give to me (as opposed to buying stuff from me), but it’s with an eye to future posts on Da Blog (I hope), as well as other projects such as my idea of writing a book on the impact of the Internet. (Even though in most cases I don’t have much time to read any of them.) Besides, many of them should be eye-opening even if I never get them. I may institute a direct donation system of some sort at some point down the line. (If it weren’t for my distrust of PayPal, I’d have one already.)

If you want to get me anything, e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com for a mailing address. I’ve organized the list by some broad topics:

MASS TRANSIT AND URBAN PLANNING

In 2008 I attempted an “October of Politics” with disastrous results. The series of political posts started with a brief digression into global warming, which led to a brief discussion of mass transit’s role in correcting it. Originally that was going to turn into a larger project, but time caught up with it, but I still want to revive that project in some form at some point. I have three books on this sort of thing already I was thinking of reviewing, but there are still more I’m interested in:

• Who’s Your City? by Richard Florida
• Suburban Transformations by Paul Lukez
• Cities by John Reader
• Cities in Full by Steve Belmont
• Any book about urban planning

POLITICAL BOOKS

The first book on this list isn’t strictly “political”, but it still ties in to related interests. Many of these relate to the battles in the Media Bias Wars.

• 10 Books that Screwed Up the World (and 5 Others that Didn’t Help) by Benjamin Wiker
• Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg
• What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News by Eric Alterman (and any other books on media bias, the role of the mainstream media, and blogs)
• The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain by George Lakoff (and any other books by the same author)
• Right is Wrong by Arianna Huffington
• Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone
• Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting Systems by Douglas J. Amy
• Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System by Douglas Schoen
• Any book on global warming and “going green”

BOOKS RELATING TO MY INTERNET BOOK PROJECT

These books are interesting in some way in terms of research for my book on the Internet, and so they’re somewhat higher priority than the others. Some have the Internet as their topic, while others are interesting filters to look at Internet culture through, or unavoidably touch on the impact of the Internet. This project is now on the back burner, so these books are lower priority than the others. There are a couple of books I didn’t list, and if I included any that aren’t impact-making or at least critically acclaimed, forget about them.

• Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott
• Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet by Kathryn C. Montgomery
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
• Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
• The Future of Work: The Promise of the New Digital Work Society by Charles E. Grantham
• Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson

OTHER INTERESTING BOOKS

Most of these books are interesting for what they say about human nature.

• The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap by Susan Pinker
• How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waltman (and other similar books)
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin
• The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretentions by David Berlinski (and other similar books)
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley (and any other books by the same author)
• Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson (and other books by the same author)
• Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose by Deirdre Barrett
• The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer
• Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind by Robert Kurzban
• Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature by Douglas T. Kendrick
• Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development by Herman E. Daly
• Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson
• The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered by John Michael Greer
• Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

JUST FOR FUN: COMICS!

Hey, trying to think all the time is a good way to burn my brain out. As you can tell by the fact I don’t have as many thought-provoking posts as I probably should.

• Any installments of The Complete Peanuts after 1974
• Any Garfield books after Garfield Gets His Just Desserts
• Order of the Stick books 2-4 (this is somewhat difficult; don’t even think about traditional bookstores; the online shop is the most reliable place to find them, and even that’s not 100% reliable; certain comic book stores may have them, but not all; gaming stores – specializing in D&D and their ilk – are more likely, but in the latter two cases availability may be based on whether or not they’re in print – the only reason this is still here is because I couldn’t even find Book 2)