Books (and other items) That Sumana Would Like

Man. Material goods. We need them, they clutter our lives, and then there is the gift thing.

If you are thinking of purchasing a gift for me, note that I support almost everything that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union do, and that they can always use your donations. Especially in the wake of 2004's and 2005's natural disasters, I really, really would prefer you donate to charity rather than give me something for my birthday or a like occasion. Charity Navigator's donation guide can help you find reputable, competent charities.

However, if you must give me an object, you can't go wrong with any of the books or other items below. Sure, I don't have enough shelf space as it is, but that's my problem.

Sumana's Book Wishlist

These are books that I would like to read, roughly ordered by my desire. When I borrow them from the library I take them off the list. You can probably find all of these books at Bookfinder, and many of them at the Powell's Books website or at any other independent bookstore.

  1. Hammer & Tickle by Ben Lewis
  2. Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman by Zac Unger
  3. Judy McKay's Managing the Test People: A Guide to Practical Technical Management
  4. The Hotel: Backstairs at the World's Most Exclusive Hotel by Jeffrey Robinson
  5. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work by Danny Hillis
  6. Gerald Weinberg's Becoming a Technical Leader: an Organic Problem-Solving Approach
  7. From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice
  8. Brian K. Vaughan's Ex Machina comic series, starting with anthology #7. Oh, Brian K. Vaughan, I will follow thee.
  9. Taken by Edward Bloor
  10. The Practical Manager's Guide to Open Source by Maria Winslow (self-published through Lulu.com)
  11. Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo
  12. Any work by Gordon Korman. Many are out of print -- I'd specifically like those, his young adult works of the 1980s. Especially neat would be No Coins, Please or Our Man Weston. I think I own all his post-2000 stuff.
  13. Code by Charles Petzold
  14. The Avatar Way of Leadership - Leadership Lessons from Rama, Krishna and Draupadi by Harsh Verma
  15. Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic by Esther Perel
  16. Dear Greenpeace by Simon James
  17. Anything by Ruth Reichl except Tender at the Bone
  18. Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael Scott
  19. Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon
  20. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon
  21. Regeneration or any other World War I novel by Pat Barker (The Eye in the Door or The Ghost Road)
  22. Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John M. Zelle
  23. Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown
  24. Seeing Like A State by James Scott
  25. Barbara Hambly's Stranger At The Wedding, a.k.a. Sorcerer's Ward
  26. The Practice of System and Network Administration by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan, and Strata R. Chalup
  27. Any work by Anthony Trollope excepting The Way We Live Now and Barchester Towers and The Warden and his autobiography
  28. Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by S. M. Casey
  29. Anything by Bruce Schneier, except Beyond Fear
  30. The Aeneid, Robert Fagles translation
  31. American Shaolin by Matthew Polly
  32. Jan Slonczewski's Still Forms on Foxfield
  33. Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge by Martin Sprouse
  34. Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States by Pete Jordan
  35. Blue Blood by Edward Conlon
  36. Hearing Beyond the Words: How to Become a Listening Pastor by Emma J. Justes
  37. Any work by George Eliot excepting Middlemarch or Silas Marner
  38. Gynaecology by Ten Teachers by Geoffrey Chamberlain, Stanley G. Clayton and Ash Monga
  39. The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan
  40. Shari Tepper's science fiction, especially The Gate to Women's Country
  41. Deadly Meeting by Robert Bernard
  42. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw (Belknap Press, April 2007)
  43. Sara Bongiorni's A Year Without "Made in China"
  44. Murder at the MLA by D.J.H. Jones
  45. Anything by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
  46. How to Design Programs by Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, and Krishnamurthi (the paper version, though I can access it for free online)
  47. Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey and Stewart C. Myers
  48. Any of Rick Cook's Wizardry series, such as Wizard's Bane, The Wizardry Compiled, The Wizardry Cursed, The Wizardry Consulted, and The Wizardry Quested
  49. Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime
  50. The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
  51. Any work by Rupert Thomson, such as Divided Kingdom or The Book Of Revelation
  52. The Wrench by Primo Levi
  53. The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky
  54. Dave Allan's Stream Ecology: Structure and Function of Running Waters
  55. Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style
  56. No Trumpets or Bugles: Recollections of an Unrepentant Babu by J.B. D'Souza
  57. War Through The Ages by Lynn Montross
  58. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads by Luke Sullivan
  59. Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
  60. Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century by Philip Ball
  61. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese
  62. Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
  63. John Holt's How Children Learn and How Children Fail
  64. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch
  65. Immunology: The Immune System in Health and Disease by Janeway, Travers, Walport, and Shlomchik
  66. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers by Sheridan Blau
  67. A Practical Handbook for the Actor by Melissa Bruder et al.
  68. The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux
  69. The Revenge Effect by Edward Tenner
  70. Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler
  71. The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye
  72. Inside Putin's Russia by Andrew Jack
  73. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
  74. Information Storage and Retrieval by Robert R. Korfhage
  75. The Elements of Persuasion by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman
  76. The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
  77. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman
  78. Social Limits to Growth by Fred Hirsch
  79. The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos
  80. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. bRamachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
  81. Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality: the Enemy Within
  82. The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzberg
  83. Farewell, My Subaru by Doug Fine
  84. Any work by J.D. Salinger, excepting Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey. Yes, I've never read Catcher in the Rye. Yes, I was an angsty teenager. I never got the memo, okay?
  85. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics by Michael Walzer
  86. Life's Dominion by Ronald Dworkin
  87. Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo With Gangs, Sailors and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965 by Samuel M. Steward
  88. Michael Blumlein's The Healer
  89. The Culture of Disbelief by Stephen Carter
  90. The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis
  91. Any of the Blue Monday anthologies by Chynna Clugston-Major
  92. The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach
  93. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky
  94. Any children's book in Russian
  95. Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton
  96. Fiasco by Stanislaus Lem
  97. Children's letters to God: the new collection (Workman Publishing, 1991, New York)
  98. Mayflower Madam: The Secret Life of Sydney Biddle Barrows by Sydney Biddle Barrows
  99. Any work by D.H. Lawrence, excepting Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers and the stories contained in Dover's Selected Stories anthology
  100. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music by Mark Katz
  101. A Budget of Trisections by Underwood Dudley
  102. John Rawls's Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
  103. Any work by Douglas Coupland, excepting Microserfs, Hey, Nostradamus!, Eleanor Rigby, and All Families Are Psychotic
  104. The Key to Metal Bumping An Instructive Manual of Body and Fender Repair Practices by Framnk T Sargent

Non-Book Item Wishlist

If you've read this far and you wish I would give you weird ideas for non-book, non-charity gift ideas for me, you're in luck.

Last updated 4 September 2008
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