What are you reading?

Neal Stephenson is awesome. I loved the first part of Seveneves. Act 2 jumped the shark a bit.

PS: Is this the Sci-Fi movie you’re doing concept work for?

Ha, no. It is a different, less intellectual movie, but still fun.

Rats :slight_smile:

But I’d love to work on the design for some of the vehicles for Seven Eves! :slight_smile: I love that one of the characters in the book is so blatantly supposed to be Neil deGrasse Tyson… I read all of that character’s lines in his voice.

I took a break from heady SciFi and am now reading “A Long Way To a Small, Angry Planet” which is pretty hilarious. Amazon.com

If you dig Stephenson, I highly recommend Reamde if you’re avoiding “heady SciFi”. Fun read.

I recently finished head up:


Forsaken Skies was a fun space opera. I need to get the other books in the series (why is everything a series now?)
Seven Eves. Very good, very complex.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Fun space adventure. Mildly funny.
The Return. After a nice set up and act 1, the rest of the book just didn’t go anywhere. A premise that ran out of steam 75 pages in.

I started The Punch Escrow last night. I’m liking it so far. It is witty and quick with a fresh premise.

I’m reading On Things As Ideas edited by Robert Stadler and Alex Valliant. Its excellent so far, definitely challenges my mind in relation to design theory.

Just finished “The Comedians” by Kliph Nesteroff. It’s a brief history of comedy. The first 3-4 chapters are hard going because I had no reference for the people he was talking about. The rest of the book was great though. It gave me a small glimpse into the real life characters of some of the comedians I grew up listening to.

The Martian.

Honestly have been reading this since January this year, and halfway through the book I got stuck on a chapter chock full of scientific/technical stuff. I haven’t watched the movie yet, and for this book, I look up anything that’s unknown to me for a better picture (MAV, chemical processes, etc). I also get more out of reading this during +1hr sessions. OK I promise I will finish the book this year. Great book though… gets the gears turning and is hilarious at times!

A few recent reads

Just finished Interstellar Age by Jim Bell (An Arizona State professor!). Pretty good book about the Voyager program. I would have preferred a little more on the discoveries and the development process of the spacecraft, but I get it, this is for mass consumption.

Having said that, I do think that the Voyager program may be the most important single project in human history since Columbus’ voyage to Hispanola. In a similar way, Voyager doubled the size of our universe by actually visiting our solar system’s outer planets.

Just finished “Autonomous”… the first novel by Annalee Newitz, one of the editors of io9.com. A slightly bleak look forward at how the world of indentured autonomous machines might effect policies on human rights and how global pharma is directing law enforcement. It still manages to be fun insight of the heavy topics.

Just got a few pages into “Artemis”, Andy Weir’s second novel. Weir wrote “The Martian” and he packs in lots of hard science. It is good so far.

I just joined and love this thread! Getting a lot of reading ideas! :slight_smile:

I am thinking of reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling.
And in similar spirit, A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

If anyone has read these and they make sense to read for industrial designers, please share!

I’m on the last book of The Three Body problem trilogy by Chinese author Cixin Liu

https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00YUQP6AE/ref=dp_st_0765377063

I recently finished Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, it blew my mind, the vast reach of the sotry in terms of space and time, changing all characters every couple of chapters, the thoughtful description of the politics of power… I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Surpried no one has gone for a film or a series, after all this time.

The foundation Trilogy is fantastic. Check out his Caves of Steel Trilogy. They connect!

Right now I’m reading American War by Omar El Akkad… this book is haunting me. Written by a Cairo born Canadian journalist who spent time covering Afghanistan, South America, and Ferguson. He decided to write a speculative Sci Fi piece about where he saw all this going…

http://www.powells.com/book/american-war-9780451493583

I just finished the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini and am currently expanding into ‘Persuasive Technology’ by B.J. Fogg. Thinking about design as a tool for persuasion makes you think more about ID from a sales perspective, if that is what you want.

I just started Dune. I can’t believe I’ve never read this! With a new Dune movie coming out in 2019 I figured I better read it.