Books

What I want to read: Amazon.com Wishlist.

Fiction

Anything by Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion, Cordelia’s Honor, among many others. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. The Thieves & Kings series by Mark Oakley.

Counting Heads by David Marusek, an excellent book in the same vein as William Gibson and Neal Stepehnson.

Non-Fiction

• Digital Copyright - great overview of Congress’s abdication of copyright to private interests.
   
• Getting Things Done - nifty time management text.
   
• Normal Accidents - discuses failure modes of complex systems.
   
• On Intelligence.
   
• Time Management for System Administrators - great time management book, written by a System Administrator for System Administrators.

Photography, Music, & the Arts

• The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China and other translations by Red Pine.
   
• The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt
   
• Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
   
• Musimathics, Volume 1.
   
• Study of Counterpoint: From Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassum.

Prose

• The Elements of Style.
   
• How to Read a Book.
   
• Revising Prose - this book is an excellent resource on how to reduce the use of passive verbs and prepositional-phrase strings that proliferate in prose. The Passive Aggression article contains other insights regarding passive verbs.

Science

• Great Geological Controversies
   
• The Rejection of Continental Drift - how American scientists were slow to embrace Continental Drift, and an extensive historical overview of Geology between the late 1800s and mid-1900s.
   
• The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
   
• Tools of Critical Thinking - how to think, the mistakes humans make, and how to avoid or at least be aware of them, presented via short “metathought” chapters.

The roadside Geology series are also an excellent resource, along with specific texts—Geology of the North Cascades—where roads are thankfully limited.