Books (and other items) That Sumana Would Like

Man. Material goods. We need them, they clutter our lives, and then there is the gift thing.

If you are thinking of purchasing a gift for me, note that I support almost everything that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union do, and that they can always use your donations. Especially in the wake of 2004's and 2005's natural disasters, I really, really would prefer you donate to charity rather than give me something for my birthday or a like occasion. Charity Navigator's donation guide can help you find reputable, competent charities.

However, if you must give me an object, you can't go wrong with any of the books or other items below. Sure, I don't have enough shelf space as it is, but that's my problem.

Sumana's Book Wishlist

These are books that I would like to read, roughly ordered by my desire. When I borrow them from the library I take them off the list. You can probably find all of these books at Bookfinder, and many of them at the Powell's Books website or at any other independent bookstore.

  1. Hearing Beyond the Words: How to Become a Listening Pastor by Emma J. Justes
  2. Gynaecology by Ten Teachers by Geoffrey Chamberlain, Stanley G. Clayton and Ash Monga
  3. Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon
  4. Judy McKay's Managing the Test People: A Guide to Practical Technical Management
  5. From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice by Patricia Benner
  6. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown
  7. The Hotel: Backstairs at the World's Most Exclusive Hotel by Jeffrey Robinson
  8. Hammer & Tickle by Ben Lewis
  9. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work by Danny Hillis
  10. Barbara Hambly's Stranger At The Wedding, a.k.a. Sorcerer's Ward
  11. People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork
  12. Gerald Weinberg's Becoming a Technical Leader: an Organic Problem-Solving Approach or The Psychology of Computer Programming to reread -- or, heck, probably anything else he wrote on the general topic
  13. The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan
  14. The Practical Manager's Guide to Open Source by Maria Winslow (self-published through Lulu.com)
  15. Any work by Gordon Korman. Many are out of print -- I'd specifically like those, his young adult works of the 1980s. Especially neat would be No Coins, Please or Our Man Weston. I think I own all his post-2000 books.
  16. 13 Fatal Errors Managers Make and How You Can Avoid Them
  17. The Game Producer's Handbook by Dan Irish
  18. Brian K. Vaughan's Ex Machina comic series, starting with anthology #8. Oh, Brian K. Vaughan, I will follow thee.
  19. Code by Charles Petzold
  20. Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic by Esther Perel
  21. The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk
  22. At Amberleaf Fair by Phyllis Ann Karr
  23. Drugs: From Discovery to Approval by Rick Ng
  24. William Esper's The Actor's Art and Craft
  25. Dear Greenpeace by Simon James
  26. The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss
  27. Anything by Ruth Reichl except Tender at the Bone
  28. Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by S. M. Casey
  29. Anything by Alexis A Gilliland, with lowest preference going to the Wizenbeak trilogy
  30. Chaos for Breakfast: Practical Help and Humor for Nonprofit Executives by Robert A. Hall
  31. Drug Discovery: A History by Walter Sneader
  32. Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael Scott
  33. Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John M. Zelle
  34. Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown
  35. Learning From Museums: Visitor Experience and the Making of Meaning by John Falk and Lynn Dierking
  36. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Goffman
  37. Practical Crime Scene Processing and Investigation
  38. Anything by Atul Gawande
  39. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
  40. Bitter Angels by C. L. Anderson
  41. The WisCon Chronicles, Volumes 1-4, from Aqueduct Press
  42. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers by Sheridan Blau
  43. A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
  44. A Practical Handbook for the Actor by Melissa Bruder et al.
  45. Design, Form, and Chaos by Paul Rand
  46. To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski
  47. Learning the Law by Glanville Williams
  48. Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime
  49. Raphael Carter's The Fortunate Fall
  50. The Fate of Mice by Susan Palwick
  51. Daniel Abraham's Long Price books
  52. Peter Brazeau's Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered
  53. Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner, Lenny Lind, Catherine Toldi, Sarah Fisk, and Duane Berger
  54. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by Richard C. Lewontin
  55. The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
  56. Triton by Delany, or anything by Samuel Delany
  57. Jack Finney's Time and Again
  58. Double Star by Heinlein
  59. Any work by Rupert Thomson, such as Divided Kingdom or The Book Of Revelation
  60. Super Spy by Matt Kindt
  61. Lucy A. Snyder's Installing Linux on a Dead Badger and Other Oddities
  62. Peter Dickinson's King and Joker
  63. The Wrench by Primo Levi
  64. Murder at the MLA by D.J.H. Jones
  65. The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky
  66. Lauren Beukes's Moxyland
  67. The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin
  68. Dave Allan's Stream Ecology: Structure and Function of Running Waters
  69. Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style
  70. No Trumpets or Bugles: Recollections of an Unrepentant Babu by J.B. D'Souza
  71. Up At The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
  72. The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner
  73. Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball
  74. Anything by Vandana Singh, such as Distances: A Novella
  75. The Geography Of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
  76. Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon Geberth
  77. Homicide by David Simon
  78. Trance-Formations by Bandler and Grinder
  79. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads by Luke Sullivan
  80. Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
  81. The Practice of System and Network Administration by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan, and Strata R. Chalup
  82. Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Kaner, Bach, Pettichord
  83. The Investigative Reporter's Handbook
  84. Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual
  85. A Fly for the Prosecution
  86. Democracy and the Foreigner by Bonnie Honig
  87. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by F.W.H Myer
  88. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
  89. The Mud Pie Dilemma
  90. Why Buildings Fall Down
  91. The Backstage Handbook
  92. Introduction to Airborne Radar
  93. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
  94. Thinkertoys
  95. Becoming The Parent You Want To Be
  96. The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook by Genevieve Jolliffe & Chris Jones
  97. Directing the Film: Film Directors on Their Art
  98. Scenic Art for the Theatre
  99. The Lie that tells a Truth by John Dufresne
  100. Genderqueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary, ed. Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins
  101. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
  102. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens by James N. Davidson
  103. Don't Believe Everything You Think
  104. Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn
  105. Moving the Earth by Herbert L. Nichols and David A. Day
  106. The Norton Book of Women's Lives, edited by Phyllis Rose
  107. The Horse's Mind by Lucy Rees
  108. Stephen Pheasant's Bodyspace
  109. Regeneration or any other World War I novel by Pat Barker (The Eye in the Door or The Ghost Road)
  110. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society by Lila abu-Lughod
  111. Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern
  112. Reading The Rocks by Marcia Bjornerud
  113. Misquoting Jesus by Ehrman
  114. In Their Own Words by David Savran
  115. Formulas for Painters by Massey
  116. The Painter's Handbook by Gottsegen
  117. Pathologic Basis of Disease by Robbins & Cotran
  118. The Movie Business Book by Jason Squire
  119. Victor Villenueva's Cross-Talk in Comp Theory
  120. Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points
  121. Which Equalities Matter? by Anne Phillips
  122. Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman's Essays in Taxation (author may be mixed up there)
  123. Weston's Rulebook for Arguments
  124. [Hidden] Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
  125. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts by Susan Hayward
  126. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (How to Help Your Child) by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
  127. Any work by Anthony Trollope excepting The Way We Live Now and Barchester Towers and The Warden and his autobiography
  128. Anything by Bruce Schneier, except Beyond Fear
  129. The Aeneid, Robert Fagles translation
  130. American Shaolin by Matthew Polly
  131. Jan Slonczewski's Still Forms on Foxfield
  132. Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge by Martin Sprouse
  133. Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo
  134. Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States by Pete Jordan
  135. Zen Training by Katsuki Sekida
  136. Blue Blood by Edward Conlon
  137. Any work by George Eliot excepting Middlemarch or Silas Marner
  138. Shari Tepper's science fiction, especially The Gate to Women's Country
  139. Deadly Meeting by Robert Bernard
  140. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw (Belknap Press, April 2007)
  141. Anything by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
  142. How to Design Programs by Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, and Krishnamurthi (the paper version, though I can access it for free online)
  143. Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey and Stewart C. Myers
  144. Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day
  145. Stage Lighting Design: The Art, The Craft, The Life by Richard Pilbrow
  146. Any of Rick Cook's Wizardry series, such as Wizard's Bane, The Wizardry Compiled, The Wizardry Cursed, The Wizardry Consulted, and The Wizardry Quested
  147. Seeing Like A State by James Scott
  148. Charles Taylor's Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition
  149. Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century by Philip Ball
  150. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese
  151. Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
  152. John Holt's How Children Learn and How Children Fail
  153. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch
  154. Crash: Ten Easy Ways to Avoid a Computer Disaster by Tony Collins and David Bicknell (subtitle also listed as "Learning from the World's Worst Computer Disasters")
  155. Personal Days by Ed Park
  156. Immunology: The Immune System in Health and Disease by Janeway, Travers, Walport, and Shlomchik
  157. The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux
  158. The Revenge Effect by Edward Tenner
  159. Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler
  160. The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye
  161. Inside Putin's Russia by Andrew Jack
  162. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
  163. Information Storage and Retrieval by Robert R. Korfhage
  164. The Elements of Persuasion by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman
  165. The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
  166. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman
  167. Social Limits to Growth by Fred Hirsch
  168. The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos
  169. Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality: the Enemy Within
  170. The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzberg
  171. Farewell, My Subaru by Doug Fine
  172. Any work by J.D. Salinger, excepting Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey. Yes, I've never read Catcher in the Rye. Yes, I was an angsty teenager. I never got the memo, okay?
  173. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics by Michael Walzer
  174. Life's Dominion by Ronald Dworkin
  175. Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo With Gangs, Sailors and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965 by Samuel M. Steward
  176. Michael Blumlein's The Healer
  177. The Culture of Disbelief by Stephen Carter
  178. The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis
  179. Any of the Blue Monday anthologies by Chynna Clugston-Major
  180. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky
  181. Any work by D.H. Lawrence, excepting Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers and the stories contained in Dover's Selected Stories anthology
  182. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music by Mark Katz
  183. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
  184. The Family Cow by Dirk Van Loon
  185. My Life With the Saints by [Father] Jim Martin
  186. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored by Adam Phillips
  187. Psychological Testing by Anastasi and Urbina
  188. Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Aries
  189. The Murder of Helen Jewett by Cohen
  190. The Making of the Trek Conventions by Joan Winston
  191. A Budget of Trisections by Underwood Dudley
  192. John Rawls's Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
  193. Any work by Douglas Coupland, excepting Microserfs, Hey, Nostradamus!, Eleanor Rigby, and All Families Are Psychotic
  194. Any children's book in Russian
  195. Kevin Carson's Organization Theory
  196. Fiasco by Stanislaus Lem
  197. Children's letters to God: the new collection (Workman Publishing, 1991, New York)
  198. Mayflower Madam: The Secret Life of Sydney Biddle Barrows by Sydney Biddle Barrows
  199. The Key to Metal Bumping An Instructive Manual of Body and Fender Repair Practices by Framnk T Sargent
  200. War Through The Ages by Lynn Montross

Non-Book Item Wishlist

If you've read this far and you wish I would give you weird ideas for non-book, non-charity gift ideas for me, you're in luck.


Last updated 2 February 2010
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