These are some of the books and essays that have stuck with me the longest. They seem to hold wisdom.
The Mississippi Meander Belt by Harold Fisk
Civilization
- Pace Layering: How complex systems learn and keep learning by Stewart Brand
- The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Wilding by Isabella Tree
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
- The Big Here and Long Now by Brian Eno
- A short history of progress by Ronald Wright
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Technology
- Succession by Sep Kamvar
- How software is eating the world by Venkatesh Rao & Grace Witherell
- Mastery & Mimicry by Sep Kamvar
- The Poet and the Computer by Norman Cousins
- Education of a Programmer by Terry Crowley
Making
- Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
- Reality has a surprising amount of detail by John Salvatier
- Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda
- We don’t sell saddles here by Stewart Butterfield
- Work on stuff that matters by Tim O’Reilly
- Make space for beauty by Sep Kamvar
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
- A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa
- Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things by Michael Braungart & William McDonough
- Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren
Philosophy
- Archetypes revisited by Craig Mod
- Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
- Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry
- The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand