Recommended reading
From time to time I have sent out lists of recommended readings and some people have appreciated them, even to the point of reading some of the books that are on them! Here are a few lists, with some limited annotation.
I begin with some books that are written for the general adult reader. I like such books—and these in particular:
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! Boston: Houghton Mifflin Mariner Book, 1913, 1995.
Ella Cara Deloria, Waterlily. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: The Noonday Press, 1997.
P. M. Forni, Choosing Civility: The Twenty Five Rules of Considerate Conduct. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002.
Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. New York: Bantam Books, 2007.
David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age. New York: Arcade, 2001.
Aaron Lazare, On Apology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.The best self-help book available for those who hunger and thirst after memory. You know who you are. This is the first of a trilogy; I recommend reading all three.
Sidhur Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. A can’t-put-it-down hit.
Here are some books on culture, ethnography, language, finance, and a mystery novel series:
Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. The work of a master ethnographer of speaking.
Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Great on codes.
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Walk around, watch, listen, write, repeat often.
Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Ask questions, listen, revise your notion of the people and place where you are doing your asking and listening, repeat until the people in that place convince you that you think you have learned something about what they think they are up to and how they do it. Throw away your questionnaires.
Martin Joos, The Five Clocks: A Linguistic Excursion into the Five Styles of English Usage. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Harbinger Book, 1961. If you could read just one short book about language, this might be the best one to choose.
Peggy Rosenthal, Words and Values: Some Leading Words and Where They Lead Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Haru Yamada, Different Games, Different Rules: Why Americans and Japanese Misunderstand Each Other. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hildy and Stan Richelson, Bonds: The Unbeaten Path to Secure Investment Growth. New York: Bloomberg Press, 2007. If you lost money in your investments in 2007-2008, you should read this book, very carefully and more than once. It has important things to say about life in general and a great definition of culture as well.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. New York: Random House, 2004.
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Arnaldur Indrithason. Jar City. The first of four superb Icelandic mysteries by this author. Read them all. But not for everyone. And with first-rate mysteries, there is a time and a place when you are ready for some particular one. For me, right now, Indrithason is the go-to guy.
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If you are a graduate student in communication, you must read these.
Bengt Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inqquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Joan C. Tonn, Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Tansforming Management. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.