Ken Zinser

Reading list

A list of books, essays, and articles I’ve read recently.

Free As In “Me”
Merlin Mann

The Cabinet of Wikipedian Curiosities
Sam Enright

The End of Writing
Oliver Reichenstein

Maya bones bring a lost civilization to life
Erik Vance

What if Hale County, Ala., Is the Heart of America?
Margaret Renkl

Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?
Eden Weingart

A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths
Nicholas Kristof

The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber and David Wengrow

Golems, smart objects, and the file metaphor
Matt Webb

A three-like WIP
Cennydd Bowles

These Precious Days
Ann Patchett

The Age of Social Media Is Ending
Ian Bogost

Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

The Quartet
Joseph J. Ellis

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
George Saunders

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Anne Lamott

Good Services: How to Design Services That Work
Lou Downe

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman

Killing Commendatore
Haruki Murakami

The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman

The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication
Ruben Pater

Life

Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity
David Allen

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Marie Kondō

Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Principles: Life and Work
Ray Dalio

Creativity and leadership

Start With Why
Simon Sinek

Change By Design
Tim Brown

Creative Confidence
Tom Kelley and David Kelley

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
Matthew Frederick

Shape Up
Ryan Singer

Typography and graphic design

Stop Stealing Sheep (and learn how typography works)
Erik Spiekermann

Thinking With Type
Ellen Lupton

Practical Typography
Matthew Butterick

The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst

Type & Typography
Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam

Typographic Systems: Rules for Organizing Type
Kimberly Elam

Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type
Kimberly Elam

Making and Breaking the Grid
Timothy Samara

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward Tufte

The Vignelli Canon
Massimo Vignelli

Fiction

The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand

Nonfiction

Night
Elie Wiesel