What I Read in 2011
A new year has begun. That means that it’s once again time to take a look back at what books I read over the past year. Unfortunately, it appears I’m trending entirely in the wrong direction. While I managed to read 38 books in 2009 and 33 in 2010, I only made it through 29 this past year. Hopefully I can reverse that trend in 2012.
One interesting trend—at least to me—is that I returned to reading a lot more web related books (10!) this year. This is in no small part related to the A Book Apart series. If they keep churning out quality books like this, that count is likely to stay very high.
As always, if the book made this list, then I enjoyed it on some level. There are far too many good books out there to suffer through one that doesn’t interest me. If I’m not enjoying it I set it aside.
If you’re looking for specific recommendations, “The Invisible Man” (which I had read before and will read again) and “The Demolished Man” top my (short) list of fiction. “Obliquity”, “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” and “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” are at the top for non-fiction (excluding the web-related ones).
- Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke
- 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
- Linchpin by Seth Godin
- Pull by David Siegel
- The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
- Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun
- Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
- The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
- Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
- HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith
- Obliquity by John Kay
- Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte (See my review)
- Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson
- CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm
- The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
- Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
- The Invisible Man by HG Wells
- The Filter Bubble by Eli Parson
- Big Deal by Robert Hoekman Jr.
- Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
- The Information by James Gleick
- Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski (See my review)
- Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter
- Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halverson
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland
- Mindfire by Scott Berkun
- Simple and Usable by Giles Colborne
- Loose by Martin Thomas