Recommended Reading:

 

Popular, Career, Business

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One – Jenny Blake

Life After College – Jenny Blake

Entrepreneurial You – Dorie Clark

Choose Yourself – James Altucher

Jack: Straight from the Gut – Jack Welch w/ John A. Byrne

How to Read Novels Like a Professor – Thomas Foster

The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer: A Double Life – J. Michael Lennon

Selected Letters of Norman Mailer – Norman Mailer, J. Michael Lennon

Rust: The Longest War – Jonathan Waldman

 

Anthropology, Sociology

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life – Emile Durkheim

The Savage Mind – Claude Levi-Strauss

Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond

The Trouble with Diversity – Walter Benn Michaels

 

History

Scars of Independence – Holger Hoock

The Many-Headed Hydra – Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Redeker

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – John Perkins

New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – John Perkins

Gulag – Anne Applebaum

Citizens – Simon Schama

The Coldest Winter – David Halberstam

Metamorphoses – Ovid – Frank Miller Translation

Inventing the Middle Ages – Norman Cantor

The Civilization of the Middle Ages – Norman Cantor

The Evolution of Medieval Thought – David Knowles

Twentieth-Century Culture – Norman Cantor

The Autumn of the Middle Ages – John Huizinga

Feudal Society – Marc Bloch

A Distant Mirror – Barbara Tuchman

Essays in the Study of Writing History – Lord Acton

Lineages of the Absolutist State – Perry Anderson

Victorian Thinkers: Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Morris – Ed. Keith Thomas

The Age of Jackson – Arthur Schlesinger

Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam – Stephen W. Sears

The Georgetown Set – Greg Herken

Empire of Cotton – Sven Beckert

The Barbarous Years – Bernard Bailyn

The American Slave Coast – Ned and Constance Sublette

The Erie Canal – Peter L. Bernstein

The Great Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge) – David McCullough

The Path Between the Seas (Panama Canal) – David McCullough

King Leopold’s Ghost (Congo Holocaust) – Adam Hochschild

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s – Ann Douglas

The Beggar and the Professor – Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie

The First Moderns – William Everdell

The Concept of Modernism – Astradur Eysteinson

The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

 

Biography, Autobiography

U.S. Grant – Personal Memoirs

William T. Sherman – Memoirs

Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend

Napoleon – Vincent Cronin

Napoleon – Felix Markham

John Marshall – Jean Edward Smith

Young Stalin – Simon Sebag Montefiore

George F. Kennan: An American Life – John Lewis Gaddis

Henry Clay: The Essential American – David and Jeanne Heidler

Louis Brandeis – Melvin Urofsky

Hugo Black – Roger Newman

Thomas Cranmer: A Life – Diarmaid MacCulloch

Ike: An American Hero – Michael Korda

 

Biology

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory – Stephen Jay Gould

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

The Gene – Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Horse – Wendy Williams

The Vital Question – Nick Lane

Power, Sex and Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life – Nick Lane

Oxygen – Nick Lane

Biochemistry For Dummies – John Moore, Richard Langley

The Genius of Birds – Jennifer Ackerman

Bugged: The Insects That Rule the World and the People Obsessed with Them – David MacNeal

Life Unfolding – Jamie Davies

Plant Intelligence – Stephen Buhner

Behave – Robert Sapolsky

Sapiens – Yuval Harari

 

Rock and Roll

The Wrecking Crew – Kent Hartman

Scar Tissue – Anthony Kiedis

Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns – Joel Selvin

One Train Later – Andy Summers

This Wheel’s On Fire – Levon Helm

Hotter Than a Match Head: Life on the Run with The Lovin’ Spoonful – Steve Boone

Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years – M. Lewisohn

Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen

Fortunate Son – John Fogerty

One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band – Alan Paul

Chronicles: Volume One – Bob Dylan

Riding So High: The Beatles and Drugs – Joe Goodden

 

Philosophy

Dialectic of Enlightenment – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer

Against Method – Paul Feyerabend

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – Fredric Jameson

The Origins of Postmodernity – Perry Anderson

The Cultural Turn – Fredric Jameson

The Prison-House of Language – Frederic Jameson

The Postmodern Condition – Jean-Francois Lyotard

A Brief History of Everything – Ken Wilber

Landscape And Memory – Simon Schama

What Technology Wants – Kevin Kelly

Aesthetics and Politics – Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht

Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times – Frederic Ewen

The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon

Madness and Civilization – Michel Foucault

Society Of The Spectacle – Guy Debord

Postmodernism – Christopher Butler

Poststructuralism – Catherine Belsey

Landscape And Memory – Simon Schama

For an Architecture of Reality – Michael Benedikt

Deconstructing the Kimbell – Michael Benedikt

Introducing Postmodernism – Appignanesi, Garratt

The Postmodern Moment – Stanley Trachtenberg

The Postmodern Turn – Douglas Kellner, Steven Best

The Closing of the American Mind – Allan Bloom

The Measure of Reality – Alfred Crosby

Chora L Works – Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman

Literary Theory – Terry Eagleton

Love and Death in the American Novel – Leslie Fiedler

Theory and Practice – Jurgen Habermas

The Post-Modern Reader – Charles Jencks

The Birth of the Modern – Paul Johnson

The Continental Philosophy Reader – Ed. Richard Kearny, Mara Rainwater

Art & Physics – Leonard Shlain

Fashionable Nonsense – Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont

 

Picture Plane

The Wright Brothers – David McCullough

Working Space – Frank Stella

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan – Julia Meech

The Origin of Perspective – Hubert Damisch

The Picasso Papers – Rosalind Krauss

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths – Rosalind Krauss

Picasso and the Invention of Cubism – Pepe Karmel

Notes from lectures at Harvard Graduate School of Design 1980 – Jim Blake

Station Point (Reflections on Cubism-Postmodernism) – Jim Blake

The Bliss Engine – Jim Blake

Zeit File: Outtakes – Jim Blake

The History of Postmodernism – Vimeo – 6 one-hour episodes – Jim Blake

Translation from Drawing to Building – Robin Evans

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man – Norman Mailer

Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature – Sypher Wylie

 

Fiction

Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer

Harlot’s Ghost – Norman Mailer

Jack Reacher – Lee Child

Panama – Thomas McGuane

Bushwhacked Piano – Thomas McGuane

Ninety-two in the Shade – Thomas McGuane

Driving on the Rim – Thomas McGuane

All the rest of the Novels, non-fiction and short story collections – Thomas McGuane

A Rumor of War – Philip Caputo

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

Chickenhawk – Robert Mason

Underworld – Don DeLillo

An Absolute Scandal – Penny Vincenzi

Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart

The Sellout – Paul Beatty

Fuck Seth Price – Seth Price

Camino Island – John Grisham