Checking things out of the library is an easy and inexpensive way to read books you may not want taking up additional space around our shrinking households. The only problem is we may want to reference these books in the future for some key observations or ideas.
Writing up a synopsis or an outline of a book takes time, but it also solidifies the book's content in your mind, while providing a future reference place to access your recollections. Since things often get more lost in our house files than in our mind, what better place to store this information than on-line.
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years
- by David Graeber
- A history of debt, from an anthropological point of view. A powerful critique of our ideas on capitalism based on the history of human civilization. A complex and well documented book that deserves the attention of anyone interested in today's economic situation.
- Powering the Future
- by Robert B. Laughlin
- A detailed examination of how we are likely to get our energy in 200 years from a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. This is an examination of the technical solutions, not our political posturing, with regards to how we get energy and fuel when fossil sources run dry.
- The Social Animal
- by David Brooks
- How our unconscious works with our conscious mind and controls much of our decision making.
- It's Always Personal
- by Anne Kreamer
- Emotions in the new workplace and how men and women are different
- The Singularity is Near
- by Ray Kurzweil
- A look at evolution in a logarithmic progression and how man-machine intelligence will soon be upon us
- The Next Decade
- by George Friedman
- Forecasting the next 10 years and how we should prepare for it
- The Master Switch
- by Tim Wu
- History of information technologies from disruptive innovations to monopolies and where we go from here
- Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
- by Michael Lewis
- What comes after the 2008 debacle: Stories of governments defaults and The Biggest Short of all
- Aftershock
- by Robert Reich
- The loss of the middle class in America and where we should go from here
- Crisis Economics
- by Nouriel Roubini & Stephen Mihm
- A study of how and why markets fail and how to recover from 2008
- Freefall
- by Joseph Stiglitz
- The 2008 crisis, our flawed response, and where we have to go from here
- Animal Spirits
- by George Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
- Why animal spirits frustrate people who propose ideologies and what we need to do going forward
- The Next Hundred Million
- by Joel Kotkin
- The American future as it grows to 400 million people
- Making Our Democracy Work
- by Justice Stephen Breyer
- An analysis of how the Supreme Court works and how it should work
- How the Mighty Fall
- by Jim Collins
- Why large companies fail and the Good to Great framework
- Getting Things Done
- by David Allen
- Managing your time, life, and work
- How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less
- by Nicholas Boothman
- Quickly establishing rapport and synchronizing your attitude and body movements with open-ended questions
- Psycocybernetics
- by Dr. Maxwell Maltz
- Keys to changing habits and behavior