Science and Idea Books for 2007

Photo: guldfisken

Yesterday, I was listening to Dave Slusher talk about his incredulity at people wondering how he'd fill 50 years without a "job". He, like me, has such a long list of books he'd like to read.

I'm guessing that he, like me, finds the very idea of being "bored" or having "nothing" to do completely foreign.

At any rate, I felt prompted to take inventory of the books I've got lying around that I haven't read yet.

So, last night, I tried to tidy up my office bookshelves and group together the books that I haven't read yet, those that I want to revisit, etc. In doing so, I noticed some distinct patterns in the type of books that I'm drawn to.

They tend to be the kind of books that let me exercise my generalist/liberal arts orientation by tapping into a wide variety of fields. They're mostly non-fiction (about 7 or 8:1) and many are scientific or philosophical. They are, however, the kind of book that is written for people outside of the field to grok.

Jason Kottke recently called them "science and idea books", which is a category I think I like better than what I've heard the publishing industry call them: popular science. I like them because they tend to fire WAY more of those synapses in my brain that make connections between things.

When I read these books, I tend to feel those sparks of insight flashing back and forth in ways that much of the online equivalent doesn't cause. I'm not sure if it's just the longer form, the context in which I read them or the form factor that contributes to that.

However, I don't really care as the effect is obvious to me after years of self-observation.

Kottke's post linked to a nice list of the best of these kinds of books that includes some intriguing title.s

I really like the end of the year for producing lists like this. They serve a handy purpose in aggregating and filtering the total list of books published in a year into a manageable list that lets me read really good books without spending a lot of time finding them.

What was disappointing was that the list itself only included the titles and authors. I didn't want to have to click each title in turn and look at them all individually.

Fortunately (at least for this particular problem), I've spent the last 2 months DEEP in the bowels of the Amazon E-Commerce API and knew that I could quickly spit out a better copy of the list.

Sure enough, it just took a quick bit of C# and I had a much better format. I uploaded a PDF of my exported list, including the editorial reviews and New/Used pricing so I can look over the whole list much more easily than looking up each of the books. You can download it too if you want. The PDF itself was generated using the techniques I mentioned earlier this week.