mirrored from http://www.deaddrop.org/ReadingList.html

A Reading List for the Rest of Us

This list was prompted by recurring discussions on various mailing lists about what constitutes good reading, and/or what books various folk recommend. O'Reilly titles are understood -- This list encompasses everything else. There will still be O'Reilly titles mentioned below -- Quality tells. Comments grouped only as to original author. No implications from ordering, or even color choices. Spelling errors, political statements, and forgotten author names all corrected free of charge.

Possible types below:

1. computer hardware and software titles
2. generally useful technical titles
3. spend some quality time here
4. specifically science fiction, or fantasy (but it's still quality)

• W. Richard Stevens (Vols 1-3 of TCP/IP Illustrated)
• Unix Network Programming, by W. Richard Stevens. ISBN 0-13-490012-X
• Unix System Administration Handbook (2nd Edition), by Evi Nemeth et al. ISBN 0-13-151051-7
• The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery. ISBN 0-912365-95-1
• Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs. ISBN 0-87857-699-1
• Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse. ISBN 0-553208-84-5 (translated by Hilda Rosner, for the non-german amongst us)
• The Education of Henry Adams, an autobiography.
• Don't Push the River (It Flows by Itself) , by Barry Stevens.
• A.E. Van Vogt -- The Weapon Shops of Isher (a fine defense of the 2nd amendment)
• Arthur C. Clarke. Childhood's End.
• Cryptonomicon., by Neal Stephenson (and Bruce Schneier)
• True Names, by Vernor Vinge.
• X Windows Series, Volumes 0 through 8 (Yes, there is a 0. Yes there is an 8).
• Practical Unix and Internet Security, Garfinkel and Spafford (O'Reilly)
• Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier.
• Essential System Administration, Aileen Frisch
• Essential Windows NT System Administration, Aileen Frisch
• Fundamental of Astrodynamics. ISBN 0-486-60061-0
• The Cabling Handbook. ISBN 0-13-080531-9 (thanks so much to all those who first suggested this)
• The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System. ISBN 0-201-54979-4
• Upgrading and Repairing PCs, by Scott Mueller. ISBN 0-7897-0825-6

• Thomas Pynchon:  Gravity's Rainbow.  Then try Mason & Dixon; read the latter at least twice.
• F. M. Dostoevsky:  The Possessed.
• Herman Melville: Moby Dick "Read every five years, starting at age 25.  If, after any reading, you have exactly the same interpretation of the book, and/or have got nothing new from it, re-evaluate your life.  You may be a stick-in-the-mud." Never forget Melville's comment that it does *not* contain allegory: it's a book about whaling.
• Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary, Salambo.
• Gustav Hasek: Good Soldier Schweik
• Saltykov-Shchedrin: The Golovlevs
• W. S. Burroughs: Cities of the Red Night
• Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova
• T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• Lao Tse: Tao Te Ching
• Robert Anton Wilson: The Illuminatus Trilogy
• Thomas Mallory: Le Morte d'Arthur
• Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim", to be read when the student feels he understands good English.  Conrad, a Pole by birth, learnt English as an adult.
• Buy a NY Times Almanac every few years.
• There are some darned interesting US Army Field and Training manuals on a variety of practical subjects.

• Hitchhiker's trilogy by Douglas Adams, anything by Terry Pratchett,
• Anything by Isaac Asimov, anything by RA Heinlein.

• Michael Padlipsky's "Elements of Networking Style", beyond doubt the funniest technical book ever written. A really vicious critique of the misguided ISO networking standards attempt, written when the "OSI model" was trendy & lots of people were babbling about the sacred seven layers. Several chapters are available as RFCs, 871 to 875.
• Terry Pratchett, Humorous fantasy/SF & likely Spider Robinson as well.
• The "old masters" of SF, especially RAH's Stranger in a Strange Land.
• I suppose "old mistresses" wouldn't be the term, but Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey are good too. More sword & sorcery fantasy than SF.
• Roger Zelazny! "Creatures of Light and Darkness" and "Lord of Light" are masterpieces. Not all his stuff is that good, but...
• Kurt Vonnegut, especially "Cat's Cradle" and "Sirens of Titan" for somewhat twisted fantasy with strange humour.
• Robert Anton Wilson for really twisted.
• But also several of the current generation of writers. Charles de Lint's "urban fantasy", the "cyberpunks" Neal Stephenson & William Gibson, ...
• Ghastly advertising: "This book will change your life". Ones that did change mine some, perhaps heavy reading but worth it:
  • Doug Hofstadter "Godel, Escher, Bach"
  • Hesse: "Magister Ludi"
  • Greg Bateson "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"
  • Robert Pirsig "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
  • Pierre Teillhard de Chardin "The Phenomenon of Man"

• The Days Are Just Packed ISBN 0836217357
• All of Asimov's work.
• All of Heinlen's work prior to 1985
• The Puzzle Palace ISBN 0140067485
• Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee SBN 030853222
• Tales of the Northwest ISBN 0880290641
• The Dancing Wu Li Masters ISBN 055326382-x
• The Religions of Man ISBN 0060809728
• Bad Medicine and Good ISBN 0806129654
• A History of Private Life  Georges Duby, Editor Arthur Goldhammer, Translator, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Spider Woman's GrandDaughters ISBN 044990508x
• The Lance And The Sheild ISBN 0805012745
• Medicine Woman ISBN 0062500260
• Custer Died for Your Sins LCCCN 6920405
• The First Coming ISBN 0394755316
• Seven Arrows Hyemeyohsts Storm  ISBN 0345329015
• Fiber Optic Communications ISBN 0133141888 (maybe in the third or even 5th edition)

• Snow Crash. I want to read it again, and I haven't even finished it yet.
• Idoru (William Gibson)
• Our Country's Good (Timberlake Wertenbaker)
• The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
• QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Richard P. Feynman)
• Burning Chrome (William Gibson) [A collection of short stories]
• Fuzzy Thinking (Bart Kosko)
• Society of the Mind (Eric L. Harry)
• The Hacker Crackdown (Bruce Sterling)
• As well as the O so obvious Linux/Webmaster in a nutshell books (O'Reilly)
• The Beach, by Alex Garland -- It's got to be in my top 3 books. If you've ever thought that it'd be nice to escape from life, read it.

• Anything by CJ Cherryh, RA Heinlein, notable mention for Chris Bunch, Alan Cole, others as they occur to me...
• Animal Farm (with political commentary dating from prior to 1950)
• 1984 - george orwell
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
• THX-1138 - Ben Bova (aka George Lucas' first film, from whence his sound system)

• Applied Cryptography (for the geek inclined)
• Sun Tzu, Art of War
• Hitler, A study in tyranny (Alan Bullock)

• Anything by Gibson (side note: Neuromancer film to be developed soon, pray for Matrix style delivery)
• Snow Crash (ne1 read Cryptonomicon yet? a review would be grand...)
• Shogun - James Clavell
• Dune series -Frank Herbert
• Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
• Lord of the Rings series - Tolkein, duh!
• Lord of the Flies - I forgot, but I dug the hell out of this back in the day.... (Wm. Golding)

• Perceptrons, by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert
• Cybernetics, by Norbert Weiner
• The Sciences of the Artificial, by Herbert A. Simon

• The Book of the Five Rings by Musahi
• Mein Kamph by Adolph Hitler -- Don't laugh or sneer.  You should know by now that an excellent way to know and defeat your enemy is to read what he writes.  Mein Kamph is basically an outline of how to make a totalitarian society.  This is exactly like knowing how to root a box gives you the knowledge to secure it.
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Republic by Plato
• other stuff by Plato, especially "The Euthyphro", from Plato's  Republic -- A conversation between Socrates and a priest, Euthyphro, in which Socrates really pissed off the priest by showing his what an ass he was. This encounter was partially why Socrates was accused of atheism.
• Reason and Responsibility by Joel Feinberg -- Contains a nice assortment of writing from lots of different philosophers including's some of Plato's accounts of Socrates' dialogues.
• Lying by Sissela Bok
• Urine Trouble -- A recent book.  All about how bogus and sloppy a lot of drug testing is. How this slop often hurts innocent people.  Contains a long list of substances and medical conditions which often cause false positives on drug tests.  Who would have guessed that diabetes can cause false positives for nearly every testable drug?

• The American Boys Handy Book; Daniel C. Beard, Noel Perrin - ISBN 0879234490 -- I was lucky enough to inherit my grandfathers copy (second edition, circa 1908), absolutely full of fascinating projects/instructions from the pre-electronics age (varmit traps, silk balloons, lean-to shelters, etc.)
• There is also an American Girls Handy Book - ISBN 0879236663, but be aware these were both written pre-Title IX (not PC iow)
• The Chemical Formulary : Collection of Commercial Formulas for Making Thousands of Products in Many Fields, Vol 1-35 (1933-1999); H. Bennett (Editor) -- Best how-to cook book I've yet run into (warning - if you didn't pass chem 101, DON'T buy these books), get at least Vol 1-5 if you can.

• James P. Hogan - Code of the Lifemaker, Inherit The Stars, Thrice Upon a Time, Voyage From Yesteryear, The Genesis Machine
• Phillip K. Dick - Divine Invasion, VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
• Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Series
• Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
• Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in A Strange Land
• Stallings - High Speed Networks
• Horowitz & Hill - The Art of Electronics
• Boas - Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences
• Zubrick - The Organic Chem Lab Survival Manual
• Shulgin - Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story (also could be in fiction)
• Kernighan & Ritchie - The C Programming Language
• Radia Perlman - Network Security
• Fiction:
  • Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (a gentler introduction to Pynchon than Gravity's Rainbow)
  • James Joyce - Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Mark Twain - The Bible According to Mark Twain
  • Robert Anton Wilson - Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, Masks of the Illuminati
  • Aleister Crowley - The Book of the Law, The Book of Lies
  • Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
  • Ken Kesey - Sometimes a Great Notion, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Non-fiction:
  • Thomas Paine - The Age of Reason
  • Alexander Hamilton, et al - The Federalist Papers
  • Bertrand Russel - Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Scientific Outlook
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology
  • Steven B. Duke, et al - America's Longest War
  • Jay Stevens - Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
  • Dr. Lester Grinspoon - Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine
  • Strunk & White - The Elements of Style
  • Clifford Stoll - The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

• Anything from O'Reilly
• Applied Cryptography - Schneier
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Raymond
• Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it - Farmer/Venema
• Science Books by Asimov
• Science books by Stephen Jay Gould
• 1960's or earlier science textbooks -- Yes they may be out of date, but I find that they have much more practical examples and are more applicable to "garage" scientists. Newer texts seem to shy away from detailed experimental setups specially those that might be un-PC (e.g. - explosive, high voltage...)  In General I recommend that you camp out in your local libraries Science and Technical Section, comb the stacks and just start pulling stuff that looks interesting
• Non-Fiction (Social Science/Religion)
  • A Users Guide to the New Edge - Out of date but a good intro to technology culture.
  • Amok Journal- (if you can stomach it) an interesting collection of papers about fringe people, practices, culture and science.
  • The Power of Myth - Campbell
  • A Psychology '101' text book - any modern text should do.
• Non-Fiction (Survival)
  • The _Original_ Boy Scout Handbook - Very un-PC but practical.
  • Boy Scout Pioneers Handbook - Once again get the oldest copy you can find
  • Improvised Munitions - (I need to pick this up but I've flipped through it - very interesting)
• Non-Fiction (Periodicals)
  • 2600, Phrack, CuD... - just for fun.
  • Scientific American - Even though they printed CM's Article (Grrrr)
  • Various from IEEE - Check out your library or an engineering library at school or work.
• Fiction:
• Dune - at least the first book
• Lord of the Flies
• A Clockwork Orange
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Blade Runner)
• Naked Lunch -- (William, not Edgar) Burroughs
• Temporary Autonomous Zone - Hakim Bey
• Howl - Ginsberg
• My Side of the Mountain - (A kid's book about living alone in the wilderness)
• Anything Tolkien (at least The Hobbit or Ring series)
• Anything Asimov (at least the Original Foundation Series)
• Bulfinch's Mythology
• 2001 - Clarke
• Anything Gibson
• Anything Shakespeare (Richard III comes to mind)
• Anything Orwell (At least Animal Farm and 1984)
• The Hunt for Red October - Clancy

• {Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game} -- The sequel, "Speaker for the Dead" completes the story.
• {Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in A Strange Land}-- Get the more-recently issued uncut version.
• Robert Anton Wilson -- Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati
• Ken Kesey -- Catch-22

• The sequel, "Speaker for the Dead" completes the story -- Correction - the sequel trilogy completes the story:
  • Speaker for the Dead
  • Xenocide
  • Children of the Mind
• ...not to mention Ender's Shadow, the soon-to-be-released "parallel" book to Ender's Game, told from the POV of Bean.  First couple of chapters are at www.hatrackriver.com somewhere.

• The Fifth Head of Cerebus --Gene Wolfe
• The Book of the New Sun (Tetrology) --Gene Wolfe
• The Hacker and the Ants --Rudy Rucker (kinda funny)
• VALIS trilogy -- P. K. Dick
• The Demolished Man --Alfred Bester (great for paranoia)
• Ulysses --Joyce (Get Gifford's Ulysses Annotated!!)
• Any short story by Horacio Quiroga (Translated from Spanish)
• Any short story by Borges (Labyrinths is a good collection) (Translated from Spanish)
• Foucault's Pendulum --Umberto Eco (translated from Italian)
• Crystals --Italo Calvino (in a collection of short stories, translated from Italian)
• The World as Will and Idea --Schopenhauer
• The Republic, Timaeus, Phaedo, Crito (death of Socrates) --Plato
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding --David Hume
• Thus Spake Zarathustra --Nietzsche
• The Moral Animal --Robert Wright
• The Tower of Babel --Robert Pennock (on evolution and creationism)
• Order Out of Chaos --Ilya Prigogine
• The Essence of Chaos --Edward N. Lorenz

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", by Shirer -- 1300 pages of microscope-up-the-ass analysis of the Nazi regime from the paperwork they were so meticulous about generating. It primarily involves the military and political aspects of the regime, as opposed to the criminal aspects (though it does touch on those too)
• anything by William Gibson
• The Oxford History of England, Oxford Press
• The Art of War, Sun Tzu, translated by Samuel Griffith
• almost any "root" religious text (The Bible, al-Qu'ran, etc.  Also basic interpretive texts, i.e. the Bhagavad Gita)
• Springer-Verlag.  O'Reilly and Associates.  Cisco Press.
• The rest of the field can be covered in short order, mostly by author: Aho et al.[2], Knuth, McKusick et al.[3], Rivest et al. [4], Stevens, and a couple other people I forget off the top of my head.
• The Dragon book, Aho/Sethi/Ullman.
• The Daemon Book, McKusick (ISTR) and three other guys whose names I forget.
• The Algorithm book, MIT press.  Contains everything you ever wanted to know about a number of algorithms.  Rivest and some other guy.