What I've Read This Year

Once you graduate from college, you no longer have a syllabus to dictate your reading material. During my first year out of college, I read books that had some way or another found their way onto my bookshelf in previous years but remained unread. The result was a fairly random selection of books with little in terms of coherence or focus.

The trouble with a random selection of books is that it becomes difficult to contextualize what you are reading. Context is precisely what a course syllabus provides, and context is what most enables you to learn and achieve a balanced perspective on a topic. In an effort to increase the efficacy of my reading, I have tried recently to choose books that at least participate in the same conversations. From the past eight months or so, this is what I have read chronologically:

The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones
The Subprime Solution, Robert Shiller
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Pioneering Portfolio Management, David Swensen
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, George Soros
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Iliad, Homer
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins
Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein

The dominance of nonfiction in this reading selection is interesting to me, and I suppose this reflects a change in my tastes and priorities. The fiction I've read has been pretty random, but the nonfiction can be organized according to a number of themes that I find myself caring about more and more. These themes include: 1) sustainability and today's environmental movement; 2) development economics; and 3) behavioral economics.

I want to fashion my future reading lists according to these three broad themes (with the occasional novel to satisfy my cravings for fiction). Next up, I have:

Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely

Would love to hear suggestions. Right now, I especially want to find a book that deals with the intersection of urban planning and sustainability issues.