Books I’ve read in 2009

This is the last list I’ll be post­ing on stuff from 2009, I promise. After this it’s all about look­ing for­ward. I’ve been track­ing my read­ing on aNobii for some time. Here’s a list of the books I’ve found par­tic­u­lar­ly worth­while, ordered chrono­log­i­cal­ly. My three absolute favorites are marked in bold.

  • Faith in Fakes, Umber­to Eco
  • Cat’s Cra­dle, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Run­ning, Haru­ki Murakami
  • Black Dogs, Ian McEwan
  • Out of Con­trol, Kevin Kelly
  • Invis­i­ble Cities, Ita­lo Calvino
  • Game Design Work­shop (2nd edi­tion), Tra­cy Fullerton
  • The New York Tril­o­gy, Paul Auster
  • Fight Club, Chuck Paluhniuk
  • A Clock­work Orange, Antho­ny Burgess
  • The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch
  • Trainspot­ting, Irvine Welsh
  • Under­world, Don DeLillo
  • Rum Punch, Elmore Leonard
  • Dig­i­tal Ground, Mal­colm McCullough
  • The Big Sleep, Ray­mond Chandler

Com­mon themes: cities, com­plex­i­ty, soci­ety & the indi­vid­ual, inner & out­er space, design.

I’ve been quite picky with what I read last year and will prob­a­bly con­tin­ue to do so this year. Many of these have heaps of dog ears and mar­gin notes and its a won­der­ful feel­ing to have them sit­ting in my stu­dio book­shelf, ready to be picked up and used when required.

My year in cities 2009

Last year was thank­ful­ly much low­er on trav­el than pre­vi­ous ones. We’re almost a week into 2010, I know, but I still thought it would be worth post­ing these.1

  • Van­cou­ver
  • Saint Augus­tine
  • Kuala Lumpur
  • Lon­don

One or more nights were spent in each place. All of these were love­ly in their own way, but KL’s my favorite of the bunch. Best city for food any­where on the plan­et. In case you’re inter­est­ed, I keep track of these on Dopplr.

  1. As per Kot­tke and many oth­ers. []