When I just happened to be looking at a post I wrote 17 years ago (for reasons that I will explain below), I was surprised to realize that today’s list of my favorite books wouldn’t be very different from that old one. Make of that what you will.

Probably, however, “favorite” is the wrong word. I should have called it something like “the 10 books that have influenced me the most.”

In case you don’t want to read that post — though you really should — I will list the books here without commentary. Don’t bother trying to figure out the significance of the order, but do read my commentary in the link in the first paragraph above. That will give you a clue to why I keep writing “10” rather than “ten.”

• A Pattern Language
• Getting Things Done
• Foundation
• A Clockwork Orange
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Gödel, Escher, Bach
• How Children Fail
• The Odyssey
• The Nine Tailors
• The Lord of the Rings
• Excursions in Calculus

What, I hear you ask, made me “just happen” to be looking at this old list? Well, I answer, as I was browsing my curated set of other people’s blogs (kept up to date by Marklet in “unread posts only” mode), I came across this very short post by my friend Mark Bernstein. So now I get to revisit A Pattern Language, and in hypertext form to boot! Then you’ll learn things like what this image shows as the solution to a common problem. Also, of course, you’ll learn what problem it is solving. When I first read this book, I read it in dead-tree form — linearly, cover-to-cover — but hypertext seems to be a much more appropriate medium.

Categories: Books, Teaching & Learning