Books I’m reading

2009 · 2008 · 2007 · 2006 · 2005

Notes

This listing is also available on LibraryThing Some books were read at the library; some were never cracked open (shown by deleted); some were simply flipped through, usually because that is the actual intended usage. See also: Book reviews.

Stats

Calculations do not include books reread [shown by (again)].

2010

January

1. City of Words: Toronto Through Her [sic] Authors’ Eyes, Sarah Elton, ed. (photo)
2. Chief Culture Officer Grant McCracken
3. How to Go to the Movies by Mr. Quentin Crisp
4. How to Have a Life-Style by Mr. Quentin Crisp (excerpts)
5. Straight Acting: Gay Men, Masculinity and Finding True Love by Angelo Pezzote
6. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns
7. McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Michael Chabon, ed.
8. And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft by Mike Sacks
9. Canada In 2020 Rudyard Griffiths
10. Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World by Warren Berger
11. The City & the City by China Miéville (★★★★★)
12. Buying In by Rob Walker
13. Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language by Patricia T. O’Conner
14. I Shudder by Paul Rudnick
15. Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker by Renata Adler
16. The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre
17. A Verse Map of Vancouver by George McWhirter
18. The Cult of Mac by Leander Kahney (dud)
19. Twenty & Change 01: Emerging Toronto Design Practices by Heather Dubbeldam
20. Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
21. Big-Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq by Steve Fainaru
22. TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television by Lynn Spigel
23. The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena by Diane Hennacy Powell
24. Doc & Raider: Caught on Tape by Sean Martin
25. Design Dictionary, Michael Erlhoff, Tim Marshall, eds.
26. X-Ray: See Through the World Around You by Nick Veasey
27. Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship
28. English as a Global Language by David Crystal

2009

December

1. Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk
2. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene
3. Flawed Dogs by Berkeley (sic) Breathed
4. Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things by Berke (sic) Breathed
5. The Edible City: Toronto Food from Farm to Fork, Christina Palassio and Alana Wilcox, eds. (dud)
6. Birds of Toronto: A Guide to Their Remarkable World
7. Doc & Raider: Incredibly Lifelike by Sean Martin
8. Change by Design by Tim Brown
9. The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction by Jonathan Ames
10. Going Rogue by Sarah Palin
11. 100 Photos That Changed Canada, Mark Reid, ed.
12. Lost Toronto by William Dendy
13. Blind Fall by Anne Rice’s gay son
14. Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (audio CD)
15. Proust and the Squid: Science and the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
16. Interaction of Colo[u]r by Josef Albers

November

1. Unit Polyhedron Origami by Tomoko Fuse (again, for the fourth time)
2. Strange Things Happen: A Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies by Stewart Copeland
3. Made With FontFont: Type for Independent Minds
4. Overspray by Norman Hathaway (again)
5. How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely
6. Curious Boym: Design Works by Constantin Boym (interloan)
7. Licensing Digital Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians by Lesley Ellen Harris
8. Guy Spaces: A Guide to Defining a Man’s Personal Space by Wayne Kalyn
9. The New Layman’s Almanac by Jacob McArthur Mooney
10. Libel by Peter A. Downard (interloan)
11. Billy and the Boingers Bootleg by Berke (sic) Breathed
12. North York’s Modernist Architecture

October

1. Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to the Present by Roxanne Jubert (interloan)
2. Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg (corrected)
3. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell (recall)
4. Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces by Albert Mudrian
5. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler
6. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
7. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer
8. Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things by Ellen Lupton
9. Symbol Sourcebook by Henry Dreyfus
10. The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent by Walter Laqueur
11. Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too by Claire Berlinski
12. Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman
13. Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
14. Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values by Brian Lee Crowley
15. Forbidden Knowledge: 101 Things Not Everyone Should Know How to Do by Michael Powell
16. The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky, Ken Williams
17. You’ll Never Know, Book One: A Good and Decent Man by C. Tyler
18. Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out by Douglas Rushkoff
19. The Foie Gras Wars by Mark Caro
20. Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism by Joseph Heath
21. Global Wording: The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English by Charles Hodgson (audio CD)
22. Designing Design by Kenya Hara (interloan)

September

1. Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things by Rick Smith
2. University of Toronto: The Campus Guide by Larry Wayne Richards
3. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain by Semir Zeki (interloan)
4. Canada Among Nations 2007: What Room to Manoeuvre? by Jean Daudelin
5. Pet-Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine by Marion Nestle
6. Boldface Names by Shineboy Govani
7. On the Meaning of Friendship Between Gay Men by Andrew Gottlieb (dud)
8. The Law of Libel & Slander in Canada by Richard H. Williams (interloan)
9. Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin
10. How to Think About Weird Things by Theodore Schick, Lewis Vaughn
11. The Penguin Book of Canadian Humour by Will Ferguson
12. How to Be a Canadian (Even if You Already Are One) by Will Ferguson, Ian Ferguson
13. How to Set Up and Run a Fashion Label by Tony Meadows
14. Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges
15. The Force of Reason by Oriana Fallaci
16. Generation A by Douglas Coupland
17. Eunoia by Christian Bök (audio CD)
18. DIY Quick Fix by Julian Cassell, Jon Eakes
19. Antiques of the Future by Lisa S. Roberts
20. The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi (audio CD)
21. Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation, Paul Buhle, ed.
22. Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows by Kathleen Collins
23. The Tall Book by Arianne Cohen (shitty type and copy)
24. Tellmewhy: The First 24 Months of a New York Design Company by Clare Jacobson, Hjalti Karlsson, Jan Wilker (interloan)
25. Super City by Douglas Coupland (interloan) (in-library)
26. Life with Letters as They Turned Photogenic by Edward Rondthaler (interloan)
27. Alphabet Thesaurus Vol. 3: A Treasury of Letter Designs by Photo-Lettering Inc. (interloan)
28. The Smart Story by Paul Guinness
29. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (audio CD)
30. Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture by Robert T. Wood
31. Graphic Interiors: Spaces Designed by Graphic Artists by Corinna Dean
32. Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television Drama since 1952 by Mary Jane Miller
33. Rewind and Search: Conversations with the Makers and Decision-Makers of CBC Television Drama by Mary Jane Miller
34. Bitchin’ Kitchen Cookbook: Rock Your Kitchen-And Let the Boys Clean Up the Mess by Nadia Giosia

August

1. Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet (audio CD)
2. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
3. Signage: Graphic Communication in the Built World by Charles B. McLendon, Mick Blackistone (interloan)
4. The Beach: An Illustrated History from the Lake to Kingston Road by Glenn Cochrane Jean Cochrane
5. Rapt by Winifred Gallagher (dud)
6. Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field (the field is not where you’re going to find “theory”) by Helen Armstrong
7. The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumo[u]r, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
8. What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
9. The Wayfinding Handbook by David Gibson (review)
10. Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett (audio CD)
11. The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton
12. Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom by Bruce Bawer
13. Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada’s Unfinished Democracy by Sylvia Bashevkin (review)
14. Toronto: The Essential Guide to the Best of the City (which I have solely for its Cocon usage)
15. The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant
16. Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn
17. Ripped by Greg Kot
18. Second Person Queer, Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schmiel, eds. (defective)
19. Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott, Theresa Neil
20. The Big Thaw by Ed Struzik
21. A History of Canadian Culture by Jonathan Vance
22. Peter Gzowski’s Book About This Country in the Morning
23. The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers by George Melnyk
24. Air Force One: A History of the Presidents and Their Planes by Kenneth T Walsh
25. Japanese Goth by Tiffany Godoy, Ivan Vartanian
26. Men’s Style by Russell Smith
27. Process, Materials, and Measurements: All the Details Industrial Designers Need to Know But Can Never Find by Dan Cuffaro
28. Captain Canuck Vol. 1 by Richard Comely
29. Angloman 2: Money, Ethnics, Superheroes by Mark Shainblum, Gabriel Morrissette
30. A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine) by Patricia Pearson
31. In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent
32. Shop Class As Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford

July

1. Neuroarthistory by John Onians (interloan)
2. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide by Johanna Drucker, Emily McVarish
3. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine (Cranky)
4. The Means of Reproduction by Michelle Goldberg
5. ABC3D by Marion Bataille (interloan)
6. Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton
7. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle (interloan) (Cranky)
8. C/ID: Visual Identity and Branding for the Arts by Angus Hyland, Emily King (interloan)
9. Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography by Emily King (interloan)
10. The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine
11. Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own by James Harkin
12. Manufractured by Steven Skov Holt, Mara Holt Skov
13. Do Good Design by David B. Berman (a title containing markup) (review)
14. For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement by Kathryn Shevelow
15. Designers in Handcuffs by Pat Matson Knapp
16. Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman
17. Digital by Design by Troika
18. Fatherland by Robert Harris
19. Free by Chris Anderson
20. Font: The Sourcebook by Nadine Monem
21. My Winnipeg by Guy Maddin (for some reason)
22. Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis, Peter H. Russell, Lorne Sossin, eds. (recall)
23. Overspray by Norman Hathaway
24. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts by Peter L. Shillingsburg
25. The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam
26. The Language of Things by Deyan Sudjic (review)
27. Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance by Stuart McGill
28. Home Game by Michael Lewis

June

1. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton (mockery)
2. Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey
3. Design As Art by Bruno Munari (three attempts)
4. Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (Cranky)
5. Quiet, Please by Scott Douglas
6. Family Outing by Chastity Bono
7. Inside the Mind of BTK by John Douglas and Johnny Dodd
8. I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions by Rafael Goldchain
9. Women of Design by Bryony Gomez-Palacio, Armin Vit (review)
10. The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff
11. The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s by Ricardo J. Brown (interloan)
12. Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (Cranky)
13. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig (Cranky)
14. The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig (Cranky)
15. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State by Andrew Gelman
16. Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas by Sylvia A. Earle, Linda K. Glover
17. The Third-Man Factor by John Geiger (recall)
18. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design by Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen (interloan)
19. The Manga Guide to Databases by Mana Takahashi
20. Mapping Graphic Navigational Systems by Roger Fawcett-Tang
21. Open and Shut: Why America Has Barack Obama, and Canada Has Stephen Harper by John Ibbitson
22. Make Your Own Damn Movie! by Lloyd Kaufman

May

1. Snark by David Denby
2. Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy
3. High and Low by Kirk Varnedoe, Adam Gopnik
4. Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin by R. Roger Remington, Robert S.P. Fripp (★★★)
5. Spaceman Blues by Brian Slattery
6. Hatchet Jobs by Dale Peck (interloan)
7. Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (recall)
8. Urban Nation by Alan Broadbent
9. Kitchen Con: Writing on the Restaurant Racket by Trevor White
10. The Science of Reading, Margaret J. Snowling, Charles Hulme, eds. (interloan)
11. Toronto’s Visual Legacy by Steve MacKinnon, Karen Teeple, Michele Dale
12. How Designers Think by Bryan Lawson
13. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick
14. Billion Dollar Kiss by Jeffrey Stepakoff (interloan)
15. Indie Publishing by Ellen Lupton
16. Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been by Mark Osbaldeston
17. American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent (★★★★)
18. Never Shoot a Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo by Mark Leiren-Young
19. The Porning of America by Carmine Sarracino, Kevin M. Scott (gruesome)
20. Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
21. A New Civil Right: Telecommunications Equality for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans by Karen Peltz Strauss
22. The Ego Boom by Steve Maich, Lianne George
23. Securing the City by Christopher Dickey
24. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (tried many times over a four-month period)
25. Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto by Rudyard Griffiths
26. Just Too Good to Be True by E. Lynn Harris (audio CD)
27. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@★! by Art Spiegelman
28. The Big Sort by Bill Bishop
29. Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal
30. Shakedown by Ezra Levant
31. A Promise to Ourselves by Alec Baldwin
32. Committed: A Rabble-Rouser’s Memoir by Dan Mathews

April

1. Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy
2. Design: Intelligence Made Visible by Stephen Bayley, Terence Conran
3. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by Michael Kimmel
4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
5. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi S. Baron
6. Leadership and the Sexes by Michael Gurian, Barbara Annis
7. Attila Richard Lukacs: Recent Work, 1990

March

1. Food Matters by Mark Bittman
2. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood by Mark Harris (again)
3. Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax
4. Doormen by Peter Bearman (interloan)
5. Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography by Ferrell McCollough
6. Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters by Bill Tancer
7. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts by Bruno Latour (interloan)
8. Hellraisers: The Inebriated Life and Times of Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris & Oliver Reed by Robert Sellers
9. We Have Ways of Making You Laugh by Sam Gross (interloan)
10. The Invisibles: Revolution by Grant Morrison
11. Desperate Networks by Bill Carter
12. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
13. Black Hole by Charles Burns
14. Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan (recall)
15. Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner
16. Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller & Scofidio by Aaron Betsky, K. Michael Hays
17. Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture by Scott Symons
18. Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music by Michael Bracewell (again)
19. Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design by Marcia Lausen (interloan)
20. Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views by Sharon Butala, David Carpenter, Helen Marzolf (interloan)
21. Web 2.0 Heroes by Bradley L. Jones (dud, naturally)
22. Text and Image by Mark Wigan
23. The Torontonians by Phyllis Brett Young
24. Basketball Jones by E. Lynn Harris (audio CD)
25. British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns by John Algeo (again) (interloan)
26. The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers
27. Fresher Styles for Web Designers by Curt Cloninger
28. Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr.
29. Blonde Like Me by Natalia Ilyin
30. Drawing on Type by Frank Newfeld
31. Empire: Nozone IX
32. Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ by Richard Dooling
33. A Day at El Bulli (perverse official orthography: elBulli) by Ferran Adrià, Albert Adrià, Juli Soler
34. Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
35. A Weekend Memoir by Ernest Hillen
36. Remix by Supreme Court loser Lawrence Lessig
37. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter
38. Young Man From The Provinces by Alan Helms
39. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey by Bill Brewster

February

1. Getting It Right with Type by Victoria Squire
2. Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost $4 Million (an Entrepreneur’s Education) by David Silverman
3. I Am My Father’s Son by Dan Hill
4. Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer
5. Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton, Jennifer Cole Phillips
6. Flexible: Architecture That Responds to Change by Robert Kronenburg (photos)
7. A Smile in the Mind by Beryl McAlhone
8. Schott’s Original Miscellany by Ben Schott
9. The Complete Peanuts 1967–1968 by Charles M. Schultz
10. Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose
11. Save the Males by Kathleen Parker (review)
12. The Orange Code: How ING Direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel with a Cause by Arkadi Kuhlmann, Bruce Philp
13. Acme Novelty Library Nº 19 by Chris Ware
14. The Visual Dictionary of Architecture by Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris, Sally Stone
15. Nerds by David Anderegg
16. Moscow Style by Mark Sutcliffe (photos)
17. H_TO, Wayne Reeves, Christina Palassio, eds. (also requires markup in title)
18. Art Photography Now by Susan Bright
19. King John of Canada by Scott Gardiner
20. Detail in Typography by Jost Hochuli (“Vox Populi”; review)
21. The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason (dud)
22. Heavy Metal Thunder: Kick-Ass Cover Art from Kick-Ass Albums by James Sherry Neil Aldis
23. Graphic Design: A New History by Stephen J. Eskilson
24. Don’t Throw It, Grow It! 68 Windowsill Plants from Kitchen Scraps by Deborah Peterson
25. Burning Down the House: Fighting Fire and Losing Myself by Russell Wangersky
26. 10×10_2: 100 Architects, 10 Critics
27. Righting the Mother Tongue by David Wolman (photos)

January

1. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (audio CD)
2. I Like You: Hospitality Under The Influence by Amy Sedaris (audio CD; dud)
3. Apikoros Sleuth by Robert Majzels
4. Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton
5. Building Construction Illustrated by Francis D. K. Ching (photos)
6. Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (audio CD)
7. The Solitary Vice: Against Reading by Mikita Brottman (review)
8. King Jammy’s by Beth Lesser
9. Electric Language: Understanding the Present by Eric McLuhan
10. Smile When You’re Lying by Chuck Thompson
11. Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film by Atom “Cronenberg” Egoyan
12. The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
13. Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music by Michael Bracewell
14. Cover Art by: New Music Graphics by Adrian Shaughnessy (photos)
15. The Steve Machine by Mike Hoolboom
16. The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada by Robert Bringhurst (photos)
17. Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander
18. Oxford Canadian Spelling Bee Dictionary, Katherine Barber et al., eds.
19. Who’s Your City? by Richard Florida
20. Signifying Rappers by Marc Costello, David Foster Wallace
21. What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage by Amy Sutherland
22. Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt (going unread due to his ill-attributed sources)
23. A Report on the Afterlife of Culture by Stephen Henighan
24. The New Blue Media by Theodore Hamm
25. Asper Nation: Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company by Marc Edge
26. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice (33⅓)
27. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood by Mark Harris
28. Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus

2008

December

1. Japanamerica by Roland Kelts
2. The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad by Michael Ross, Jonathan Kay
3. Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel
4. Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics by Peter Hall, Andrea Codrington
5. The Knowledge Book: Everything You Need to Know to Get By in the 21st Century
6. Mafiaboy by Michael Calce, Craig Silverman
7. Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s [Alleged] Top Bloggers by Michael A. Banks
8. Good Taste by Peter Trifonas
9. Thirtysomething Stories by Herskovitz, Zwick, et al. (interloan)
10. Porsche: The Engineering Story by Jeff Daniels
11. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
12. Bold Visions: The Architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum by Kelvin Browne
13. X Saves The World by Jeff Gordinier
14. Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? by Morgan Spurlock (audio CD)
15. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee
16. Rotten English by Dohra Ahmad
17. A Century of New Words by John Ayto
18. The Visible Word: Problems of Legibility by Herbert Spencer (interloan)
19. Izzy by Peter C. Newman
20. Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920–1965 by Richard Hollis (interloan)
21. Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow (four times, but I finished it)
22. Lush Life by Richard Price (audio CD)

November

1. Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography by Pierre Borhan
2. Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott
3. Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma
4. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
5. My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman
6. The ITC Typeface Collection (interloan)
7. Walt Loves the Bearcat by Randy Boyd
8. The Curious World of Carnivorous Plants by William Barthlott, Stefan Porembski, Rödiger Seinem, Inge Theisen
9. My Mercedes Is Not for Sale by Jeroen Van Bergeijk (a book with markup in its title)
10. Toronto: A City Becoming (“Utopia for grownups”), David Macfarlane, ed.
11. Spy vs. Spy 2: The Joke and Dagger Files by Peter Kuper et al. (interloan)
12. The Perfect Scent: A Year Behind the Scenes of the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York by Chandler Burr
13. The Layout Book by Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris
14. Manufacturing Processes For Design Professionals by Rob Thompson
15. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson
16. Options [perverse official orthography: oPtion$]: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs by Fake Steve Jobs Dan Lyons
17. Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language & Style by Arthur Plotnik
18. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
19. The Science of Good Food by David Joachim, Andrew Schloss, A. Philip Handel
20. The World In Six Songs by Daniel Levitin

October

1. The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap by Susan Pinker (★★★★)
2. Ego and Ink: The Inside Story of Canada’s National Newspaper War by Chris Cobb (again)
3. Berlin: City of Smoke by Jason Lutes
4. States by Christopher Griffith (interloan)
5. Right Is Wrong by Arianna Huffington
6. The Truth About Canada by Mel Hurtig
7. The Big Switch by Nick Carr
8. The Fruit Hunters by Adam Gollner
9. Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium by Philip Dodd
10. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which I actually finished
11. The Road by Cormac McCarth (audio CD)
12. Straight Talk about Cosmetic Surgery by Arthur W. Perry
13. Be the Pack Leader by Cesar Millan, Melissa Jo Peltier
14. How Sassy Changed My Life by Kara Jesella, Marisa Meltzer (interloan)
15. An A–Z of Type Designers by Neil Macmillan (interloan)
16. First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far)
17. Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography by John Ibson
18. The Starbucks Experience by Joseph Michelli

September

1. When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (audio CD)
2. From Hell by Alan Moore (interloan)
3. Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit by Sandra Bloodworth, William Ayres (interloan)
4. Historical Atlas of Toronto by Derek Hayes
5. The Art of Clairtone by Nina Munk, Rachel Gotlieb
6. Best American Essays 2007
7. The Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication by Larry Gonick
8. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
9. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
10. 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks
11. Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television
12. Heat by Bill Buford (audio CD)
13. Towers of Deception by Barrie Zwicker
14. Y: The Last Man: Nº 10: Whys and Wherefores by Brian K. Vaughan
15. Bring on the Apocalypse by George Monbiot
16. Designing Effective Communications by Jorge Frascara
17. DesignArt by Alex Coles
18. United Empire Loyalists: Pioneers of Upper Canada by Nick Mika
19. The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement by Christopher Moore
20. Digital Infrared Pro Secrets by David D. Busch
21. The Vegetable Dishes I Can‘t Live Without by Mollie Katzen
22. Mastering Materials, Bindings & Finishes by Catharine Fishel
23. Night of the Mary Kay Commandos by Berke (sic) Breathed
24. Creative City by Charles Landry
25. The Tenacity of the Cockroach: Conversations with Entertainment’s Most Enduring Outsiders by the Onion

August

1. The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
2. Foul! the Secret World of FIFA by Andrew Jennings
3. Love, Castro Street: Reflections of San Francisco
4. What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank
5. DMZ 1 & 2 by Brian Wood, Riccardo Burchielli
6. The Holmes Inspection by Mike Holmes
7. Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion by Michael Wex
8. Stop Forgetting to Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz by Peter Kuper
9. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey by Geoff Pevere, Greig Dymond
10. On a Personal Note by Rita MacNeil

July

1. Writing for the Internet by Jane Dorner
2. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (whose surname I always misread with the pronunciation “Julie”)
3. Lunch With Jan Wong (at TRL)
4. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
5. The Design of Future Things by Don Norman
6. Blackletter: Type and National Identity (at TRL)
7. Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke (audio CD)
8. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
9. Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas Ben Fry
10. Get to Work by Linda Hirshman
11. Concrete Toronto by Spacers™
12. How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman (whose excruciating nasal voice we are spared)
13. Welcome to Pyongyang by Charlie Crane
14. The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair (inevitably) by Marion Roach (interloan)
15. Get Ahead in Spelling by Robert Allen, John Seely
16. Canada’s Queen by Patti Tasko
17. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with [Peggy] by Earl Ingersoll
18. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley (review)
19. Chasing Adonis: Gay Men and the Pursuit of Perfection by Tim Bergling
20. The Truth (with Jokes) by Al Franken (audio CD)
21. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (audio CD)

June

1. Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to the Present by Roxanne Jubert, Serge Lemoine (at TRL)
2. Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (interloan)
3. Athlete by Howard Schatz, Beverly Ornstein (interloan)
4. Athlete/Warrior by Jonathan Anderson (interloan)
5. Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert
6. Simpsons Comics Strike Back
7. Great Design Using Non-Traditional Materials by Sheree Clark, Wendy Lyons
8. Simpsons Comics Royale: A Super-Sized Simpson Soirée
9. Futurama Adventures
10. Communication Design: Principles, Methods and Practice by Jorge Frascara
11. Designed by Peter Saville
12. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida
13. The Affected Provincial’s Companion by Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy (interloan)
14. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges
15. The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
16. Got War? by Garry Trudeau
17. Designing programmes: Four essays and an introduction by Karl Gerstner (interloan)
18. Wayshowing by Per Mollerup (again)
19. Eliot Noyes by Gordon Bruce (interloan)
20. City Making in Paradise by Mike Harcourt et al.
21. Memphis: Research, Experiences, Result, Failures and Successes of New Design by Barbara Radice
22. Camouflage by Tim Newark (interloan)
23. Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism by Umberto Eco
24. The Future of Music by David Kusek
25. Who Owns Canada Now? by Diane Francis
26. Microtrends by Mark Penn, Kinney Zalesne
27. The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis
28. Rule the Web by Mark Frauenfelder

May

1. The Barnbrook Bible by Jonathan Barnbrook (at TRL)
2. Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground (at TRL)
3. When Languages Die by K. David Harrison (interloan)
4. Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography by Christopher Burke (interloan)
5. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide by Laura J. Murray, Samuel E. Trosow (interloan)
6. Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design by Henry Petroski (interloan)
7. The Maple Leaf Forever: A Celebration of Canadian Symbols (only three of them – Mounties, beavers, maple leaves) by Donna Farron Hutchins, Nigel Hutchins
8. If/Then: Design Implications of New Media (interloan)
9. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
10. Phototypesetting: A design manual by James Craig (interloan)
11. Intercambios: Spanish for Global Communication (First Canadian Edition) by Guiomar Borrás, James N. Hendrickson, Stephen Henighan, Antonio Velásquez (interloan)
12. Looking Good: A Guide for Men by Charles Hix (photos by Bruce Weber) (interloan)
13. The Architecture of Parking by Simon Henley (interloan)
14. The Outsports Revolution: Truth & Myth in the World of Gay Sports by Cyd Zeigler, Jim Buzinski
15. Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home by Ted Owens
16. Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews by Gary M. Kramer
17. Slang Through the Ages by Jonathon Green
18. The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design by Paul Betts (interloan)
19. Creative Time: The Book by Anne Pasternak (interloan)
20. Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander
21. Regret the Error by Craig Silverman
22. The Ice Palace That Melted Away by Bill Stumpf (which I might have edited in an early form)
23. Saul’s Book by Paul Rogers
24. The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
25. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture by Geert Lovink
26. Managing Humans by Rands
27. Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock (audio CD)
28. United States by Laurie Anderson
29. The Visual Dictionary of Graphic Design by Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris
30. The Fran Lebowitz Reader
31. Blue Covenant by Maude Barlow
32. Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People by Roy MacGregor
33. Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups by Joe Kissell
34. Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (again)

April

1. Street Furniture by Jacobo Krauel (a dud)
2. Conservatize Me by John Moe
3. While You’re Reading by Gerard Unger
4. Dubliners by James Joyce (audio CD)
5. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Paul Giamatti (audio CD)
6. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
7. Risotto by Jenny Stacey, Kathryn Hawkins
8. The Everything Soapmaking Book by Alicia Grosso
9. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
10. City of Night (finally) by John Rechy
11. Brownsville by Neil Kleid
12. Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later by Johannes Itten
13. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (with fabulous metal type)
14. Thonet, Stahlrohr, Möbel
15. The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf
16. Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen
17. I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead by Sam Gross

March

1. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Tom Hollander (audio CD)
2. In Search of the Standard in Canadian English by Strathy Language Unit (actually added sometime last year)
3. Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr
4. Accidental City by Wedgie Fulford
5. The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! by Adrienne Shadd, Afua Cooper, Karolyn Smardz Frost
6. East/West: A Guide to Where People Live in Downtown Toronto by Mark Fram, various Spacers™, et al. (with a strictly limited definition of “east”)
7. Retro Graphics by Jonathan Raimes, Lakshmi Bhaskaran
8. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (audio CD)
9. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk
10. Starring Brian Linehan by George Anthony
11. Canadian Oxford Dictionary of Current English
12. The Book of Dave by Will Self
13. The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd
14. Forms in Modernism: A Visual Set by Virginia Smith
15. The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid
16. Psychogeography by Will Self
17. Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon
18. Acme Novelty Library Nº 18 by Chris Ware
19. I Remember by Joe Brainard
20. The Story of English by Robert McCrum et al.
21. Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type by Geoffrey Dowding
22. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture by Daniel Harris
23. Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out by Katia Roberto and Jessamyn West
24. Arts and Letters by Edmund White
25. Radical Graphics/Graphic Radicals by Laura Harper (interloan)
26. Design and Art by Alex Coles
27. Androphilia by avowed satanist Jack Malebranche (“male branch” of the family tree?) (interloan)

February

1. Consolation by Michael Redhill
2. Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson et al.
3. Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual by Timothy Samara
4. I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now by Damien Hirst (J. Barnbrook, designer; at TRL)
5. The New Kings of Nonfiction by Ira Glass
6. Canadian English: Origins and Structures by J.K. Chambers
7. When Words Deny the World by Stephen Henighan
8. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America by Andrei S. Markovits
9. The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore
10. Berthold Fototypes E1 (at TRL)
11. Bareback: A Tomato Project (at TRL)
12. Made You Look by Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Hall (at TRL)
13. Pentagram: The Compendium (at TRL)
14. Experimental Formats 2 (“Mr. Shake-Hands Man II”) by Roger Fawcett-Tang (at TRL)
15. Architectural Graphic Standards (at TRL)
16. Area by Valerie Vago-Laurer, Patrick Busse (at TRL)
17. Turning White: A Memoir of Change by Lee Thomas
18. Architecture of the Absurd by John Silber
19. Collins Canadian Essential English Dictionary & Thesaurus
20. Editing Canadian English
21. What Is Publication Design? by Lakshmi Bhaskaran
22. Guide to Canadian English Usage by Margery Fee, Janice McAlpine (also 1997 edition)
23. Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
24. Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television by Greg Downey
25. A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture by Reyner Banham
26. Concrete at Home by Fu-Tung Cheng
27. Concrete Design by Sarah Gaventa
28. Becoming a Digital Designer by Steven Heller (inevitably), David Womack
29. America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn
30. In Bad Taste? The Adventures and Science Behind Food Delicacies by Massimo Marcone
31. The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers by Matthew Hays
32. Whipping Girl: A [Transgenderist] Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
33. What Not to Build: Dos and Don’ts of Exterior Home Design by Sandra Edelman, Judith Kay Gaman, Robby Reid

January

1. The Complete Peanuts 1963–1964 by Charles Schulz
2. The War Within: One More Step at a Time by G. B. Trudeau
3. Brodovitch by Andy Grundberg
4. Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility by Steven Heller (inevitably), Véronique Vienne
5. The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media
6. Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete by Jean-Louis Cohen, G. Martin Moeller (interloan)
7. Y: The Last Man Volume 9: “Motherland” by Brian K. Vaughan
8. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (audio CD)
9. The Top 100 Canadian Albums by Bob Mersereau
10. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach by Henry Rogers
11. Vegan Vittles: A Collection of Recipes Inspired by the Critters of Farm Sanctuary by Joanna Stepaniak
12. Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story by Harvey Pekar
13. Starbucked by Taylor Clark
14. Signage Systems and Information Graphics by Andreas Übele
15. Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso
16. Faking It by Hugh Barker
17. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
18. The Complete Peanuts 1965–1966 by Charles M. Schulz
19. Directions 2007 by ADCC (without an ISBN or author)
20. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal
21. The Angry Island by A.A. Gill
22. Only in Canada[,] You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language by Katherine Barber
23. Language and the Internet by David Crystal
24. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (audio CD)
25. Acme Novelty Library Nº 17 by Chris Ware
26. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (yes) by Jane Jacobs

2007

December

1. Other Men’s Sons by Michael Rowe
2. Architecture in the United Kingdom by Philip Jodidio
3. Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire by Linda McQuaig
4. The A–Z of Modern Design by Bernd Polster
5. Concrete:: Design, Construction, Examples by Martin Peck
6. Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex (audio CD)
7. A.A. Gill Is Away by A.A. Gill
8. Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off
9. The Dip by Seth Godin
10. Stupid to the Last Drop by William Marsden
11. I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert (audio CD)
12. G1: New Dimensions in Graphic Design by Neville Brody, Lewis Blackwell
13. Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth by the Onion (Scott Dikkers)
14. Signs: Lettering in the Environment by Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon
15. Graphic Design: Visual Comparisons by Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Bob Gill (interloan)
16. How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe, Philip Oltermann

November

1. The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen
2. It’s Not News, It’s Fark by Drew Curtis
3. Toronto Sprawls by Lawrence Solomon
4. Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story by Randall Rothenberg
5. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
6. The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are by Andrew Cohen
7. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
8. British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns by John Algeo (interloan)
9. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (audio CD)
10. The [Four]-Hour Workweek by full-of-shit ginger Timothy Ferriss
11. Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment by Blaine Brownell (interloan)
12. Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the 20th Century by Rosemarie Ostler (interloan)
13. Shortcomings by Adrian Tomin[é]
14. High-Definition DVD Handbook: Producing for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc by Mark R. Johnson, Charles G. Crawford, and Christen M. Armbrust
15. 79 Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut
16. Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
17. Um… by Michael Erard

October

1. Christmas Days by Derek McCormack
2. The Nasty Bits by Tony (never “Anthony”) Bourdain
3. This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood by Jack Valenti
4. Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design by Audrey Bennett, Steven Heller (inevitably)
5. Greentopia [perverse official orthography: GREENTOPIA]: Towards a Sustainable Toronto by various Spacers™
6. Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous
7. 25 Apartments and Lofts Under 2,500 Square Feet (an astronomical amount of space, hence no problem whatsoever to furnish, hence “under” is misleading and disingenuous at best) by James Grayson Trulove
8. The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture by Alanna Stang, Christopher Hawthorne
9. Advertising Design and Typography by Alex White
10. Dictionnaire du snobisme gastronomique par David Kamp, Marion Rosenfeld
11. Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
12. Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis by Florian Coulmas
13. Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson
14. Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums
15. Pictograms, Icons and Signs by Rayan Abdullah, Roger Hubner
16. Details in Contemporary Architecture by Christine Killory, René Davids
17. The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design by Ronald Lee Fleming (interloan)
18. Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
19. Mean City by John Martins-Manteiga (blog post)
20. The Book of Boy Trouble: Gay Boy Comics with a New Attitude by Robert Kirby, David Kelly
21. Athletic Ability and the Anatomy of Motion by Rolf Wirhed

September

1. Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities by Johanne Sloan
2. Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission by Thomas H. Kean, Lee H. Hamilton
3. Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties by Rick Poynor (again, but not interloan)
4. Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century
5. The Secret Life of Logos: Behind the Scenes with Top Designers by Leslie Cabarga
6. Graphic Design as a Second Language by Bob Gill (interloan)
7. American Splendor: Another Day by Harvey Pekar
8. The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows by James Morrison
9. Vegetarian Sports Nutrition by D. Enette Larson-Meyer
10. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher
11. Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson
12. Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs, and What it Really Means to be Vegan (interloan)
13. Looking Closer 4 [cover: Four; title page: 4; copyright page: 4]: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, Bierut et al., eds.
14. Living by Design: The Partners of Pentagram, edited by Peter Gorb (interloan)
15. Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
16. True to Type: An Autobiography of Ruari McLean (interloan)
17. Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone (actually some time earlier)
18. Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference by Robert L. Harris
19. Interior Design Visual Presentation by P. Alves
20. Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin (audio CD)
21. Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, Sara Quin
22. Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes by Saul Austerlitz (interloan)

August

1. Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love (superior original title: How Dirty Girls Get Clean)
2. The Copy[-]editor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn
3. The Forms of Colo[u]r: The Interaction of Visual Elements by Karl Gerstner
4. Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
5. Kissing Bill O’Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About TV by Ken Tucker (interloan; blog post)
6. Why Aren’t More Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate the Evidence Wendy M. Williams, Stephen J. Ceci
7. The Adonis Complex The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession
8. Format (The Shape and Size of a Book Etc.) by Gavin Ambrose , Paul Harris
9. Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success by Allan Metcalf
10. How I Live Now: by Meg Rosoff (audio CD)
11. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry by John S. Schuchman (interloan)
12. Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd by Sam Horn
13. Signage and Wayfinding Design by Chris Calori
14. London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
15. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
16. Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook by Antonio Prohias (and Peter Kuper)
17. Spook Country by William Gibson
18. Thinking Visually by Mark Wigan
19. The Practical Guide to Information Design by Ronnie Lipton
20. FAC 461
21. The Complete Graphic Designer: A Guide to Understanding Graphics and Visual Communication by Ryan Hembree
22. Enamelling by Ruth Ball
23. The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

July

1. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton
2. From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up by Ted Gideonse, Robert Williams
3. The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal
4. Canadian Television Today by Bart Beaty, Rebecca Sullivan (blog post)
5. The TTC Story: The First 75 Years
6. Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture by Paul Arthur, Romedi Passini
7. War Fix (definitely not Boy) by Steve Olexa, David Axe
8. The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
9. The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg (awful)
10. A Designer’s Research Manual: Succeed in Design by Knowing Your Clients and What They Really Need by Jennifer Visocky
11. The seriously underwhelming Y: The Last Man Volume 8: “Kimono Dragons” by Brian K. Vaughan
12. The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer
13. How to Live in Small Spaces: Design, Furnishing, Decoration and Detail for the Smaller Home by Terence Conran
14. Toronto by Geoffrey James

June

1. Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition by Kimberly Elam
2. World Englishes: An Introduction by Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw
3. Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits by (inevitably) Steven Heller and his wife Louise Fili
4. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
5. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles
6. Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times by Kevin Smokler
7. Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
8. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavio[u]r by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
9. Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, a complete piece of shit by Kevin Roberts
10. PDW: Publication Design Workshop by Timothy Samara
11. Far-Seer by Robert J. Sawyer
12. The Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker (interloan)
13. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
14. The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer (audio CD)
15. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson, Ernie Colón
16. Design City Toronto by Sean Stanwick and Jennifer Flores
17. What We Do Is Secret by (“Thorn” [“Þorn”?]) Kief Hillsbery
18. Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski (interloan)
19. Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image by Felice Frankel (interloan)
20. Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting by a cast of thousands
21. Bulletproof Ajax by Jeremy Keith
22. Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design by Shawn Lawton Henry (merely skimmed)

May

1. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud
2. HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS by Patrick Griffiths
3. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (gift of Geekslut)
4. We Are Not French: Language, Culture, and Identity in Brittany by Maryon McDonald (interloan)
5. Wayfinding: Designing and Implementing Graphic Navigational Systems by Craig Berger (yes, that Craig Berger)
6. Hart’s Rules for Compositors (interloan; 37th edition, 1967)
7. Sign Gallery (interloan)
8. Successful Sign Design (interloan)
9. Typography Papers 5
10. Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment by Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson, Stephanie B. Gibson (interloan)
11. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
12. The Kill Bill Diary: The Making of a Tarantino Classic by David Carradine

April

1. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (audio CD)
2. Designing Across Cultures by Ronnie Lipton
3. The Complete Peanuts 1961–1962 by Charles M. Schulz
4. A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond by Christine Vachon, Austin Bunn, John Pierson
5. Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen
6. EverywareThe Dawning Age of [Narcissistic] Computing by Adam Greenfield
7. Up, Down, Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks by Alisa Goetz (interloan)
8. Graphic design: Reproduction and representation since 1800 by Paul Jobling and David Crowley (interloan)
9. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp
10. Small Is the New Big by Seth Godin
11. Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday by Peter H. Salus, Arnold M. Zwicky, James D. McCawley, Robert I. Binnick (interloan)
12. Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh by Ina Saltz (gift of Nagaijin)
13. The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! American Films of the 1970s by Ron Hogan & Peter Bogdanovich (gift of Nagaijin)
14. An Essy on Typography by Eric Gill (1941 edition) (interloan)

March

1. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
2. Dog Days by Ana Marie Cox
3. Safe: Design Takes on Risk and Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design, two totall Dullsvilles by Paola Antonelli
4. Women Designers in the USA 1900–2000 by Pat Kirkham
5. Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s by Sally Gibson
6. A Broadcast Engineering Tutorial for Non-Engineers by Graham Jones

February

1. Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS by Celia Farber
2. Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo by John Crewdson
3. Typography by Friedrich Friedl
4. Stripped: The Illustrated Male by Claus Kiessling, Joris Buiks, eds.

January

1. Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design by R. Roger Remington, Barbara J. Hodik
2. Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949–2002 by Minglang Zhou, Joshua A. Fishman (interloan)
3. The Science of Reading: A Handbook by Charles Hulme, Margaret Snowling
4. Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham
5. Vegan Italiano: Meat-free, Egg-free, Dairy-free Dishes from Sun-Drenched Italy by Donna Klein
6. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Eddie Tufte
7. 20th-Century Type Remix by Lewis Blackwell
8. Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire by Cliff Atkinson
9. Home and Abroad by Martin Parr
10. American Prospects by Joel Sternfeld
11. Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time by Natalia Ilyin (interloan; ★★★★★)
12. A raft of books by and on Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Wolfgang Tillmans, which I flipped through the way a secretary does a copy of Vogue
13. Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino (interloan), who thinks he’s a better writer than he is
14. Speaking Canadian English by Mark M. Orkin (second-hand find by Suzanne™)
15. The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism by Katie Roiphe
16. The Visual Nature of Colo[u]r by Patricia Sloane
17. Language and Typography by Cal Swann
18. The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism by Charles Jencks (I bought the latest edition)
19. How Typography Works (And Why It Is Important) by Fernand Baudin
20. The Complete Guide to Digital Color Correction by Michael Walker
21. Graphic Design as Communication by Malcolm Barnard
22. The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

2006

December

1. Brian K. Vaughan extravaganza: Y: The Last Man (which Vaughan pronounces as one word: “YtheLastMan”) with Pia Guerra, Jr. & Jose Marzan; Ex Machina with Tony Harris; Pride of Baghdad with Niko Henrichon
2. What is Graphic Design For? by Alice Twemlow
3. Dutch Graphic Design: 1918–1945 by Alston W. Purvis (second-rate at best)
4. Dutch Graphic Design: A Century by Kees Broos, Paul Hefting (ditto)
5. This Is My Country[;] What’s Yours? by the notably snobbish Noah Richler
6. The Best of Brochure Design 8 by Ann Willoughby
7. Paperwork: The Potential of Paper in Graphic Design by Nancy Williams
8. Twentieth-Century Type (though the cover reads 20th Century Type), one of the innumerable editions by Lewis Blackwell
9. Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design by April Greiman (astonishingly dated 1980s dot-matrix graphics)
10. Butt Book: Best of the First Five Years Of Butt Magazine by Wolfgang Tillmans, Jop Van Bennekom, Gert Jonkers, Bruce LaBruce (FANTASTIC MAGAZINE FOR HOMOSEXUALS)
11. The Book of Photography: The History, the Technique, the Art, the Future by Anne H. Hoy
12. Toronto Modern: Architecture 1945–1965
13. Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke
14. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks

November

1. Beautiful Evidence by Eddie Tufte, which includes The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, meaning you wasted your money on the latter if you bought the former
2. A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese
3. An Accidental Canadian: Reflections on My Home and (Not) Native Land by Margaret Wente
4. The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher
5. A Guide to Ecstacity by Nigel Coates, Marcus Field, Brian Hatton, Theodore Zeldin (designed by Why Not, and boy, does it have an amazing cover)
6. Paul Rand: Modernist Designer by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo
7. Double Game by Sophie Calle, Paul Auster
8. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
9. Sign Design: Graphics, Materials, Techniques by Mitzi Sims
10. Designing Type by Karen Cheng
11. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English by Grant Barrett (chocolate foot, respeaker, i18n, bouma, roadblock)
12. Foul<bang> The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging, and Ticket Scandals, which is quite a mouthful
13. False Flat: Why Dutch Design is so Good by Aaron Betsky, Adam Eeuwens
14. Informal (Architecture) (parens not necessarily in original) by Cecil Balmond, Jannuzzi Smith, Christian Brensing, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas
15. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks (perverse official orthography: BOBOS* in Paradise)

October

1. Colloquial Hebrew (to at least learn the bleeding alphabet) by Tamar Wang, Zippi Lyttleton
2. I. by Stephen Dixon
3. Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss
4. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 by Simon Reynolds
5. Designers on Design by Terence Conran, Max Fraser
6. College Street – Little Italy: Toronto’s Renaissance Strip by Denis De Klerck, Corrado Paina
7. Spy: The Funny Years by George Kalogerakis with Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen (q.v., q.q.v.)
8. Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design by Walter Tracy
9. Sign Graphics by Marta Serrats (translation of Imagen Gráfica)
10. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (excessively literary and recherché but strong nonetheless)
11. Digital Typography: An Introduction to Type and Composition for Computer System Design by Richard Rubinstein (outdated, and I worry I should have been remembering, or photocopying, more from it)
12. Type, Image, Message: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop by Nancy Skolos & Tom Wedell (packed to bursting with superb examples, many of them, oddly enough, by the authors)
13. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 by Johanna Drucker (a thesis in book form, a crashing bore, and an example of how not to typeset in a spindly, half-arsed digital bastardization of Caledonia)
14. National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook: 39th Reunion
15. Unjustified Texts: Perspectives on Typography by Robin Kinross
16. Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century by (inevitably) Steven “I Hate Design Blogs” Heller
17. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages by Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine
18. The Complete Peanuts 1959–1960 by Charles M. Schulz

September

1. The Designer and the Grid by Lucienne Roberts & Julia Thrift
2. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander
3. Designing Books: Practice and Theory by Jost Hochuli & Robin Kinross
4. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by a cast of thousands
5. Designing Typefaces by David Earls

August

1. Words & Buildings: The Art and Practice of Public Lettering by Jock Kinneir (interlibrary loan)
2. Lettering on Buildings by Nicolete Gray (interloan)
3. Lettering in Architecture by Alan Bartram (interloan)
4. Pioneers of Modern Typography by Herbert Spencer (interloan)
5. Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties by Rick Poynor (interloan)
6. The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934 by Deborah Wye (interloan)
7. Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design by Paul Mijksenaar (interloan)
8. Modern Typography by Robin Kinross (reading very selectively)
9. The Forms of Color: The Interaction of Visual Elements by Karl Gerstner
10. Twentieth-Century Type Designers by Sebastian Carter
11. Six Chapters in Design: Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, Henryk Tomaszewski by Philip Meggs
12. My Lives by Edmund White
13. The ABCs of ▴■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory, Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, eds.
14. Decoration and Its Uses by Edward Johnston (not typeset but calligraphed)

July

1. How Buildings Work: The Natural Order of Architecture by Edward Allen and David Swoboda
2. Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by David Balter and John Butman
3. Cockeyed: A Memoir by Ryan Knighton
4. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times by Omar Calabrese
5. Type & Image: The Language of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs
6. Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar, a book so pretentious it needs a chain of subtitles, by Gary Erickson and Lois Lorentzen

June

1. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham (excellent audio-CD version by Alan Cumming)
2. Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design by Steven Skov Holt, Mara Holt Skov (with texturized lenticular cover that offgasses)
3. Independent People by Halldór Laxness (gift from Sigrún)
4. Isms [perverse official orthography: ...isms]: Understanding Architectural Styles by Jeremy Melvin
5. In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution by Andrew Parker
6. The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd (more than most entries on these lists, a MEANING TO GET AROUND TO IT title)
7. Types Best Remembered/Types Best Forgotten by Robert Norton

May

1. Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopædia of Camouflage (whose title I could not, and cannot, remember) by Hardy Blechman
2. How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy
3. The Life of Graham by Bob McCabe

April

1. Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens by Cheryl Mendelson
2. Gay Male Pornography: An Issue Of Sex Discrimination by Christopher N. Kendall, which I expect to be complete horseshit
3. The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning by that total bore Robert Bringhurst (review)
4. Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers: by Sarah Horton, on the same topic as, and published by the same publisher as, my own book (another of New Riders’s many little fuck-yous)
5. Adrian Frutiger: Son œuvre typographique et ses écrits by Jost Huchili et al.
6. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs by Katherine Barber, with simply awful type, several typos, and horrid British spelling and ‘quotation marks’

March

1. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden
2. Vas: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula
3. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form by Venturi, Brown, & Izenour
4. Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to This Field of Art by Otto Wagner (with a pretty serious redesign by Laurie Haycock)
5. Graphic War: The Secret Aviation Drawings And Illustrations of World War II by Donald Nijboer (with amazing exploded, X-ray, and cutout diagrams)
6. The World’s Writing Systems by Peter T. Daniels & William Bright
7. Ethnologue: Languages of the World: Maps and Indexes by the Christians at SIL, namely Barbara F. Grimes
8. Disability Drama in Television and Film by Laurie E. Klobas

February

1. The Big Show: Hight Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards® by Steve Pond
2. Counterpunch by Fred Smeijers (thanks to Antonio)
3. Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story by Steve Wilson & Joe Florenski

January

1. The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann
2. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (CD)
3. A Century of Graphic Design by Jeremy Aynsley
4. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco by Peter Shapiro
5. Bully: It’s the Pits by Paul 107 (critique)
6. Diary of a Drag Queen by Daniel Harris
7. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
8. America: The Book by The Daily Show

2005

December

1. Utopia: Towards a New Toronto, edited by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox
2. Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicent[re] of the Dot.Com [sic] Juggernaut by James Marcus
3. The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream by John Ibbitson
4. Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh
5. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler
6. In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson (CD)

November

1. Various Onion compilations
2. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle, so insubstantial that I blazed through it at a Starbucks (also prone to hard-to-catch copy errors I nonetheless caught)

October

1. The Design of Dissent by Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilić
2. The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books by Thomas Wharton
3. PINS by Jim Provenzano
4. Like People in History by Felice Picano
5. Heeb, eventually
6. Fanfare for the Area Man: The Onion Ad Nauseam Complete News Archives, Vol. 15

September

1. Pyrrhus, that is, An Arrow’s Flight (q.v.) by Mark Merlis (★★★★★ [or merely “a well-written, interesting exercise”])
2. Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia
3. Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935–2005 by Phil Bailes
4. All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers by Stefan G. Bucher
5. Size Matters: Effective Graphic Design for Large Amounts of Information by Lakshmi Bhaskaran
6. Large Graphics: Design Innovation for Oversized Spaces by Cheryl Dangel Cullen
7. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop by Timothy Samara

August

1. Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry
2. The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson: “You are a star. You only happen once”
3. Queer Wars by Paul Robinson
4. Resident Alien: The New York Diaries by Quentin Crisp
5. The Stately Homo: A Celebration of the Life of Quentin Crisp, edited by Paul Bailey, which Amazon simply does not have
6. Libel: A Handbook for Canadian Publishers, Editors and Writers by Julian Porter
7. Light Before Day by Christopher Rice (at least, it is in the pile; all I’ve done is check the type [Caledonia])
8. Type Design: Radical Innovations and Experimentation by Teal Triggs (no relation)
9. The Encyclöpedia öf Heavy Metal by Daniel Bukszpan

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Updated 2010.02.02 15:15