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.