When I hear about a new book I want to read, I often add it to my Amazon.com wishlist. I was just looking through said wishlist and noticed what a wide, weird array of things are on there:
- What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee
- Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson
- Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson
- Attack of the Bacon Robots (Penny Arcade vol. 1) by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
- House of Leaves : A novel by Mark Z. Danielewski
- The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman
- The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg
- Chance : A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just About Everything Else by Amir D. Aczel
- Human Cognitive Abilities : A Survey of Factor-Analytic Studies by John Bissell Carroll
- Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade
- Llama, Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney
- The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves by Annie Murphy Paul
- The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions by Robert Todd Carroll
- The Hedge Knight by George R. R. Martin
- Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# by Brian S. McWilliams
- The Road to the Dark Tower : Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus by Bev Vincent
- The Art of Fiction : Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner
- Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland
- Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds by J. C. Herz
- The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch
- Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix by Glenn Yeffeth (Editor)
- Competency-Based Recruitment and Selection by Robert Wood and Tim Payne
These books came to my attention through various places: seeing them advertised, seeing them on talk shows, reading about them on friends’ blogs, and God knows where else. I have no idea how some of them ended up on there. Looking the list over, though, it seems to be a pretty good representation of my major interests: video games, I/O Psychology, the Internet, science, and llamas.
About the only thing missing is web design, probably because I get most of my info on that online. And I guess there’s not a whole lot of fiction on that wish list, even though I obviously read a lot of that. Most of my fiction reading, though, it is following authors I like or just picking up random stuff.
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