My current and upcoming reading pile 📚 What’s in yours?

I’m so glad to have maintained a log of the books I’ve read since 2005. Not least because it’s such a window into the ways I’ve changed over the years. Anyway, I’ve created a page that lists the books in reverse chronological order. Some gaps are true gaps and some are just record-keeping failures.

Now moving on from a book about limits on tools to one about simpler living.

Finished reading Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. Short book but not a quick read. Dense with ideas that, I believe, are crucial for people concerned about staying human in a time of rapidly accelerating technology.

I’m sad to finish Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Next, I would like to at least read The Portable Jung and the Red Book. Any other recommendations for an interested layman?

I could read Memories, Dreams, Reflections all day long. It’s a book full of mysterious visions and dreams from a person who is among the deepest minds of the last few centuries—yet it is completely readable.

When I saw that @ayjay was reading Matthew B. Crawford’s book Why We Drive, it inspired me to revisit Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, particularly since I’ve started woodworking this year. I read the original article when it came out in 2006 (seventeen years ago!) and was thrilled by it and the book that followed. Rather than completing the re-read, though, I’m moving on to The Word Beyond Your Head, which may be more relevant to what I’ve been thinking about lately.

So Cory Doctorow’s new book is about an accountant?? I’m in. To be fair, it’s a book about a forensic accountant, those Humphrey Bogarts of the accounting world that the rest of us can only admire.

Finished reading The Green Man by Kathleen Basford. Actually, there isn’t a lot of text—mostly great pictures of Green Man and related architectural decoration. These are a few of my favorites.

If all goes as planned, I am three days away from visiting Muir Woods, so I’m reading this in earnest. Very good so far.