Books you probably should have read by now:
I dropped out of college in 1984, shortly after reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. I was (still am) quite disillusioned with the institutions of higher education.
Outside the influence of the classroom and the ever-present syllabus, I became more selective about what I chose to read. I learned to read for comprehension, rather than just cramming as much as possible into the shortest amount of time. There’s a huge difference. When you really want to understand a difficult piece of writing, it may have to be read and thought about and read again. College never allowed me that latitude.
I am an empiricist. Everything we learn builds on what we have learned. A reference from one book will often lead to the next book. A broader cultural literacy allows us to understand allusions to other works, be they art or literature or music or design. Jean Piaget said, “Cognitive development is cumulative: understanding a new experience grows out of what was learned during a previous experience…The process of performing tasks of increasing complexity is done by ‘standing on the shoulders’ of tasks performed in the immediately preceding stage.”
In the canon of truly American literature, Henry David Thoreau stands out as one of our earliest voices. Walden is eminently accessible, at its core a rather simple story about a man who builds a small house and lives in it for a couple of years. Most readers won’t get Thoreau’s dry Yankee humor, or his allusions to Classical writers and Vedic scripture. Try On Civil Disobedience, or Life Without Principle, if you doubt his philosophical depth. Consider Thoreau a welcome antidote to Ayn Rand. Consider also that Gandhi, King, Mandela all read On Civil Disobedience, and credited Thoreau with influencing their philosophies of non-violence.
English majors, time and again, have complained that Thomas Hardy’s work is ‘depressing’. Tess of the D’urbervilles certainly is. Double that for Jude the Obscure. Far From the Madding Crowd is one of the classic love stories of all time…
If you have been led to believe that Cormac McCarthy’s writing is too graphically violent, because of The Road or No Country for Old Men , try reading his Border Trilogy instead. Only the first book, All the Pretty Horses, has been made into a movie. I don’t think Hollywood is ready for the rest of that story. Yeah, there are a few gut-punch moments, but the underlying theme is chivalry, the cowboy code of honor…give your word, and do it or die. Quixotic lost causes, and a deep searching look at our inability to understand the culture of Mexico.
Do you prefer contemporary authors? Try Iain Pears, whose first major novel An Instance of the Fingerpost is a complex mystery told in four voices. Pears is an art historian, and will take you through several epochs of European civilization in The Dream of Scipio; or the worlds of 19th c. Venice, Paris, and London in Stone’s Fall. His most recent book Arcadia is set in 1960’s Oxford, amongst the pubs and fantasy worlds of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
For several years, I refused to read fiction, preferring non fiction instead.
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander is one of the most enduring design books of the twentieth century. Of similar importance is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Each modestly brilliant, built on the author’s knowledge and experience. The increasing tendency toward specialization has produced generations of designers who have no idea how to actually make things, and a workforce of laborers who have no concept of design. John Ruskin harangued his readers about this in The Stones of Venice.
Other People’s Houses by Jennifer Taub isn’t a design book. It is rather a scathing indictment of the banking excesses that led up to the sub-prime mortgage fiasco of 2008. Beginning with the Federal Reserve’s attempt to curb inflation in the 1970’s by raising interest rates, continuing through de-regulation of Savings and Loans in the 1980’s, she catalogues the criminality of bankers and mortgage brokers who robbed millions of Americans. Anyone who owns a house, or has a mortgage, or is considering making that investment, should be required to read Other People’s Houses.
