Scott's Recommended Reading List:

Cryptography   Computer Systems    Shakespeare   Beckett   Mac Wellman   Len Jenkin   Other Playwrights    Literary Fiction   Science Fiction   Capitalism   Communism   Cooking   Reading List

This reading list is a little out of date. My Amazon Wishlist is probably more accurate, since I go through and make sure it's up-to-date before Christmas and birthdays. ;-). But most of these books I would still recommend...

Cryptography:

• Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography
• David Kahn's The Codebreakers; The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

Computer Systems:

• Alessandro Rubini's Linux Device Drivers
• Andrew Appel's Modern Compiler Implementation in Java (also C and ML ).
• Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms in C
• Richard P. Paul's SPARC Architecture, Assembly Language, Programming, and C
• Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
• Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.

One-dollar Shakespeare!

• Complete Songs from the Plays (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Complete Sonnets (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Hamlet (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Henry IV (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Julius Caesar (Dover Thrift Editions)
• King Lear (Dover Thrift Editions)
• MacBeth (Dover Thrift Editions)
• The Merchant of Venice (Dover Thrift Editions)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Much Ado About Nothing (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Othello (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Richard III (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Romeo and Juliet (Dover Thrift Editions)
• The Taming of the Shrew (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Twelfth Night : Or, What You Will (Dover Thrift Editions)
• The Misanthrope - okay, it's not Shakespeare, but it's still only a buck!

Works of Samuel Beckett

• Waiting for Godot
• The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett
• Endgame
• Happy Days

Plays and Novels by Mac Wellman

• The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays by Mac Wellman
• Annie Salem : An American Tale
  To quote the Kirkus Review: "A wacky blend of fantasy, whimsy, and satire from an author who clearly knows what he's doing, even if almost no one else will."
• A Murder of Crows and the Hyacinth Macaw
• Second Hand Smoke and the Lesser Magoo

Plays by Len Jenkin

• Careless Love
• Dark Ride and Other Plays

Other Plays

• Clifford Odet's The Flowering Peach.
  Actually, I couldn't find a copy of this still in print.
  The closest I found was Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays , which contains Waiting for Lefty, Awake and sing!, Till the day I die, Paradise lost, Golden boy, and Rocket to the moon.
  Still fine reading, and recommended.
• Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest
• Vaclav Havel's The Garden Party and Other Plays
• Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's Madman and the Nun & the Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (Including the Water Hen)
• Sam Shepard : Seven Plays and Fool for Love and Other Plays .
• Tennessee Williams's Camino Real and Orpheus Descending (in Four Plays)
• Athol Fugard's Valley Song , Master Harold , and Blood Knot and Other Plays .

Literary Fiction

• Mason & Dixon ; Thomas Pynchon.
• Pale Fire ; Vladimir Nabokov.
• The Handmaid's Tale ; Margaret Atwood.
• The Sparrow ; Mary Doria Russell.
• Lives of the Monster Dogs ; Kirsten Bakis.
• Bad Monkeys ; Matt Ruff.
• Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy ; Matt Ruff.
• Fool on the Hill ; Matt Ruff.

Science Fiction

• Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2
• Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree: Book One of the Fionavar Tapestry.
• Guy Gavriel Kay's The Wandering Fire: Book Two of the Fionavar Tapestry.
• Guy Gavriel Kay's The Darkest Road: Book Three of the Fionavar Tapestry.

Capitalism

This section contains books addressing some of the lessons we still haven't learned from the Dickens and the Industrial Revolution.

• Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! : Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry ; John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton.
• One World, Ready or Not : The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism ; William Greidner.

Cookbooks and Culinary Guides

• The Basic Gourmet : 100 Foolproof Recipes and Essential Techniques for the Beginning Cook
• Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook
• Potatoes: A Country Garden Cookbook (good luck finding a copy)

Unsorted

• Bad Penny at Bow Bridge ; Mac Wellman.
• Children of God ; Maria Doria Russell.
• In the Country of Last Things ; Paul Auster.
• The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss .
  Seuss didn't just illustrate children's books. He also created art for his own personal enjoyment --- and it's fascinating.
• Dubliners ; James Joyce.
  I like Joyce's post-nervous-breakdown work better, but not everyone agrees with me. Read this if you like structure and polish.
• Fool's War ; Sarah Zettel.
• A Guide to Latex : Document Preparation for Beginners and Advanced Users ; Helmut Kopka, Patrick W. Daly.
• Arm Architecture Reference Manual ; Dave Jagger.
• Cryptonomicon ; Neal Stephenson.
  Too long, needs an editor, and Stephenson can't write an ending to save his life - but still a crucial book for anyone contemplating the revolutionary role of technology in the present and future. A post-cypherpunk history book. I can't explain it any better. Just read it.
• Haunted Traveller ; Barry Yourgrau.
• This Side of Paradise ; F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• Thirst ; Ken Kalfus.
• Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies ; Ken Kalfus.
  See also the terribly amusing Salon books article by Kalfus, "To my executors".
• A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present ; Howard Zinn.
  This is a must-read for anyone who's been force-fed white-bread histories of America in school. Like any True Believer, Zinn sometimes stretches to make his points, but even if you scale the whole thing back a couple points, his facts are still compelling and eye-opening.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ; Robert Pirsig.
  Eye-opening. I need to re-read this guy a couple times to internalize everything Pirsig discourses on. Made me re-think what it means to be a student.
  

Reading List

• The Orwell Reader : Fiction, Essays and Reportage ; George Orwell
• Burmese Days ; George Orwell
• The Rebel Angels ; Robertson Davies.
• Underworld ; Don DeLillo.
• The Annotated Lolita ; Vladimir Nabokov.
• Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! ; John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton.
• Candide ; Voltaire.
• Chicago Poems ; Carl Sandburg.
• The Metamorphosis and Other Stories ; Franz Kafka.
• The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City ; Robert Sullivan.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ; Jared Diamond.
• Quarantine ; Jim Crace.
• Alternating Current ; Octavio Paz.
• Symposium and Phaedrus (Dover Thift Edition) ; Plato.
• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett ; James Knowlson.
• The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder ; Thornton Wilder, Donald Gallup, A. Tappan Wilder, John Guare.
• True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor ; David Mamet.
• After Many a Summer Dies the Swan ; Aldous Huxley.
• Love in a Dead Language ; Lee Siegel.
• Story : Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting ; Robert McKee.
• Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War ; Leo Marks.
• The Ultra Secret ; F. W. Winterbotham.
• The Glass Bead Game ; Hermann Hesse.
  Recommended to me by David Stawinski after he read my Salon article. Looks like mighty fine reading to me.
• The Devil's Cup : Coffee, the Driving Force in History ; Stewart Lee Allen.
• The English Patient ; Michael Ondaatje.
• Love in the Time of Cholera ; Gabriel García Márquez.
• Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicle ; Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov.
• The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth ; Robert Graves.
• Lila : An Inquiry into Morals ; Robert M. Pirsig.
• Code : And Other Laws of Cyberspace ; Lawrence Lessig.
• Fight Club ; Chuck Palahniuk.
• Trout Fishing in America, the Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar ; Richard Brautigan.
  Recommended by Katie Jeffreys. Despite her not eating meat, I think I trust her taste.
• Mrs. Dalloway ; Virginia Woolf.
  Also recommended by that Jeffreys chick.

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