With this post I’m starting a new series, named after a little piece of furniture you tend to forget once it is sitting aside of your bed. Independently of its looks or hidden qualities, a nightstand works best when it demurely serves its purpose without drawing a lot of attention. Which in itself is always a sign for great design. What makes a nightstand worth writing a paragraph about though, are the good books piling up on its surface.
I have to admit, at the moment I don’t even have a nightstand. But I do have books next to my bed, and that pile is in steady rotation. I read them all at once, sometimes no more than two paragraphs a night. Which is resulting in a very slow rotation.
There’s a certain quality you will see reflected. None of this writing is about science in a traditional sense, Harvard business tactics, modern management, or how to invest your money best. It is about humans and how they live with each other, in groups, societies, sometimes struggling with human nature, sometimes blindly following patterns we were not aware of, but we’re allowing them to rule our path of decisions. These books were written by brilliant minds, tinkerers about all things connected.
Not all of them are easy reads, and with some I’m really having a hard time biting my way through. In fact I’m sometimes tempted to put a book away. But then it does something to me, and this is probably the best reason why you may want to have a closer look: The influence of these books resembles the effect of drinking seawater. The more you drink, the thirstier you get.
One more thing. I hope you will enjoy this series and it might inspire you to read the books portrayed in it. But it would be boring if you only read about what I’m reading. Don’t be shy to tell me about your nightstand too. Throw a book in my direction and see if it will knock me out.
Coming up
The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda
Wir nennen es Arbeit, by Holm Friebe and Sascha Lobo
Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
Emergence, by Steven Johnson
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks, by Mark Buchanan
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, by Albert László Barabási
Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, by William C. Taylor and Polly Labarre
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore
Failed States, by Noam Chomsky
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, by Philip Ball
The Meaning of the 21st Century, by James Martin
Who Are We?, by Samuel P. Huntington
Comments