Lifetime reading list for geeks

Here’s a list of 50 Books Every Geek Should Read from InsideTech. I thought this list might go well with my request for basic reading in educational technology from a few days ago, and in fact there could probably be some overlap.

Of the books on the list, I’ve read:

• All but three of the “sci-fi classics”;
• The Tufte book (although real geeks don’t just read the books, they go to the workshops);
• All three of the crypto books (and I do agree that Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon counts as a crypto book, even though it’s a novel);
• Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line (which is sort of the anti-digital native book);
• Gödel, Escher, Bach (when I was in college, although I confess I didn’t really understand much of it);
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done and am currently re-reading it before the semester starts; and
• Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and although this GraphJam chart is absolutely true, I did in fact read this back in college and even understood a lot of it thanks to my outstanding Honors colloquium class in spacetime physics which I once blogged about.

For math geeks, and perhaps for general geeks, I’d add G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. For higher education geeks, add on The Shadow University by Kors and Silverglate.

I think Longitude is going to go in my personal queue next.

Filed under: Geekhood, Math, Technology, books , books, geek, neal stephenson, reading