What’s in my reading pile? November 2012

Each month, I plan to take a photo snapshot of what I’m currently reading. Here’s my bedside table pile right now:

“A Bigger Digger” by Aucklander Brett Avison is my younger son’s favorite book at the moment. He never tires of it when I read it to him over and over again. He loves the very last page which has a pop-up giant digger and the dinosaur bones discoveries.

I’m part way through “Paper” by Ian Sansom – it’s a “museum tour” of how paper has been used over time, and its importance to our current way of living. It’s amazing how many different products use paper – and not just the most obvious ones! (Haven’t got to the part explaining how high speed train wheels are connected to paper yet.) I’ve been given this copy to review for their website thanks to one of our lovely clients, Kiwi Families. Interesting that the Christchurch earthquake is included as an example of the digital-paper-digital life cycle: open data maps were printed off, people walked the streets and annotated the map with damage information, then photographed the maps which updated the digital version.

I’ve been meaning to get a copy of “Information is Beautiful” by David McCandless for a while now thanks to my statistical background and I was also given a copy of this to review of Kiwi Families. There’s plenty of bad examples of infographics out there, but I do like David’s work in general. There’s plenty of fascinating dinner conversation starters in this book if you open the book on a random page.

I have’t yet looked thoroughly at “Typography Sketchbooks” by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico, but will get there soon!

I’ve picked up my copy of “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from my bookshelf again and have been re-reading bits of it. Always plenty of food for thought in there.

I’ve been cooking a few recipes from “Fresh & Easy” by Hornby lately; on loan from my local library. The book has gorgeous photographs and has a unique way of presenting recipes: you see a bird’s eye view photo of all the ingredients laid out before you start cooking, along with a bird’s eye view of each step in the recipe. Seeing all the ingredients visually (as well as in text format) actually makes it quite easy to flip through and find something to cook – you immediately can see which ingredients you have and which ones you need.

What’s in your reading pile?