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