The Roundup: Summer reading list
Relaxing reads that will get your wheels turning.
The Design Better summer reading list
As you head out on holiday this summer, it’s always nice to have a couple good reads tucked in a bag to pass the time. Our reading list this summer has nothing that would pass as homework. While you may not want to read books that take you back into work mode, these titles will get your wheels turning in new ways that just might make you look at design and technology with fresh eyes.
Join Eli and Aarron September 28–29 in Sonoma for the September Work(shop) Leadership Excursion — an intimate, conversation-first gathering of forty design leaders in the heart of wine country, built to challenge how you think about your craft and the coalitions behind it. Only a handful of tickets remain — see the lineup and reserve your spot.
Aarron’s summer book recommendations
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Hollywood has done this book a disservice. The monster of film and Halloween costume is not the creature Shelley actually wrote: he is articulate, heartbroken, abandoned by his creator, and adrift in a world that refuses to see him. The real horror isn’t the monster. It’s Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris — his willingness to wield the power of technology without once pausing to consider what he’d set loose.
Two hundred years after its publication, that question feels newly urgent. The dialogue alone is worth the read. And it’s hard not to be a little awestruck knowing Shelley wrote it at 18, during the Napoleonic Wars, in an era when publishing was nearly impossible for women.
It’s a classic for a reason.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Persig
On the surface, this is a book about a father and son riding motorcycles across the American Northwest. Underneath, it’s one of the most serious attempts anyone has made to answer the question: what is quality, and why does it matter?
Pirsig’s narrator is obsessed in the best way with the relationship between a person and the thing they’re caring for. A motorcycle maintained with genuine understanding runs differently than one maintained by the manual. The difference isn’t mechanical. It’s philosophical. When you truly know something, you stop working on it and start working with it.
He calls this “gumption”, the psychic fuel that keeps a craftsperson going when the work gets hard. It’s not enthusiasm. It’s the willingness to stay present with a problem until it opens up.
That idea feels worth examining right now. As more creative work gets handed off to tools that can approximate quality without understanding it, there’s something clarifying about a book that insists expertise is not just useful, it’s a form of care, a discipline, and maybe even a moral obligation.
The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
It’s easy, lately, to lose faith in us. The news does not help. And yet.
Liu Cixin’s novel — the first in a trilogy that became a global phenomenon — opens during China’s Cultural Revolution and builds toward one of the most unsettling premises in science fiction: an alien civilization has spotted Earth, and they’re on their way. They’ll arrive in four centuries. Humanity has until then to prepare.
What follows is a profound argument about what we actually are. The alien threat is assumed to be technologically insurmountable. Certain humans, confronted with this, decide the species isn’t worth saving anyway. It’s a seductive kind of despair, the feeling that our failures are too deep, too structural, too human to overcome.
The book demolishes that conclusion.
What makes us formidable turns out not to be our tools. It’s the way we think, our capacity to reason under pressure, to cooperate across impossible distances, to refuse the obvious answer when something in us insists there’s another one. Curiosity. Stubbornness. The willingness to stay in the problem.
A great summer read, and a useful corrective for anyone who’s been spending too much time doom scrolling.
Eli’s summer book recommendations
Endymion by Dan Simmons
This was a recommendation from DB guest Paul Dichter (Stranger Things writer). It’s part of Simmons’ Hyperion series, which I loved as a teenager. I’d revisited some of the earlier books in the series, but this is my first time re-reading Endymion, which explores themes that seem very relevant right now. It’s set in the far future, and explores what forms AGI might take, and what happens when technologies have their own motivations, and what happens when some are taken away from us.
Make Something Wonderful by Steve Jobs
A physical copy of this book was gifted to our graduating class of design students at Stanford this year. Hard copies can be hard to come by (though you can find them on eBay) but you can find the whole thing online for free too. As a kid who grew up playing games like Karateka, Lode Runner, and others on the Apple II, it was a nostalgic journey to read the oral history, emails, and other communications that his archive collected for this book. As a designer, it was interesting to see how much he cared about the design of his products from the very beginning (this quote is from a talk he gave at the Aspen design conference in 1983): We have a chance to make these things beautiful, and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves.
Rumpole on Trial by John Mortimer
This one is a bit far afield from the design and tech world, but sometimes we need a break from such things, and summer seems like a good time.
I'm not typically a fan of legal dramas, but I am a fan of British humor, and the poetry-quoting, “Chateau Thames Embankment” drinking barrister Rumpole is so entertaining that he makes even the inherently dry legal system in the UK entertaining.
“The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctor's surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they have something interesting to think about.”
—John Mortimer
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