Reading: late 2020

A short reading list at the end of a long year. Mostly not from the design press, as usual.

Recursion by Blake Crouch. A novel. Read it in two sittings, which is the right tempo. The structural device, where the book repeats with small variations, is doing real work that I have not seen done as well in another book this year.

The Premonition by Michael Lewis. The story of the people in American public health who saw what was coming early in the year and could not get the system to listen. The book is most useful, for designers, as a portrait of how organisational dysfunction looks from inside. Recognisable.

The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. Long. Difficult. Worth the effort. The argument that left-brain analytical thinking has crowded out right-brain integrative thinking is uneven in places, but the diagnosis of what the modern professional class spends its time on is closer to right than I am comfortable with.

An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. The studio’s reading on how to run a small organisation that takes growth, including individual growth, seriously. Most of the management writing in the design press is downstream of this book without acknowledging it.

Robin Sloan’s newsletter keeps being the publication that has most influenced how I think about writing here. He is in the field, but writes from the side of it.

Frank Chimero on quitting Twitter (the relevant posts from this year) is one of the few pieces of writing about the social internet I have read this year that is not mostly self-justification.

Maggie Appleton’s digital garden is the cleanest example I have seen of what a personal site can do that a Twitter feed cannot. If you have been thinking about restructuring your own site, look here first.

Julia Evans’s blog is the writing about software that I send to designers most often, when they want to understand the systems their work runs on. She is not a designer. The clarity is the point.

Eight things, which is more than I would normally list in a year-end note. The year has had a lot of empty calendar to fill with reading. The shape of the next year, I suspect, will be different.