Alexander's 253 patterns for towns, buildings and rooms; the book software engineers stole from.
Strunk and White's eighty pages on writing plainly; omit needless words.
Four stories of a Bronx tenement; Will Eisner coined the term graphic novel for it.
Kuhn's paradigm shifts; the book that gave the phrase to everyone.
Steven Levy on the MIT hackers, the homebrew club and the game makers who built the culture.
Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.
Jane Jacobs against the planners; eyes on the street and short blocks.
Freud's royal road to the unconscious, from 1899.
John Hersey follows six survivors through the day of the bomb; the New Yorker gave it a whole issue.
Julia Child's 1961 book that taught Americans to make boeuf bourguignon.
Knuth's volumes since 1968; the book programmers own and do not finish.
Dee Brown's history of the American West from the Native side, 1860 to 1890.
John Berger on how oil painting and advertising teach us to look; the BBC series as a book.
James Baldwin's two essays of 1963 on race and religion in America.
Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.
Tracy Kidder inside Data General building a computer in 1979; the first great tech book.
Maya Angelou's childhood in Arkansas and the years of silence after the rape; the first of seven memoirs.
A father and son ride from Minnesota to California while Pirsig asks what quality is.
Vasari on Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo; art history begins in 1550.
Gombrich from cave paintings to the present; the art history book with no jargon, eight million copies.
Socrates on justice, the philosopher-king and the cave; the book Western philosophy replies to.
Five golden tickets and Willy Wonka; Dahl's factory of sweets and punishment.
One is not born but becomes a woman; de Beauvoir's 1949 foundation of feminism.
Evolution from the gene's point of view, and the word meme; Dawkins' 1976 classic.
One apple, two pears and a lot of cake; the board book with holes.
Max in his wolf suit sails to the island of the wild things; ten sentences and every child knows them.
Chatwin follows a piece of brontosaurus skin to the end of South America; the modern travel book.
Darwin's one long argument for natural selection, still readable.
Rachel Carson on DDT and the birds that stopped singing; the book that started environmentalism.
Carnegie's 1936 rules: remember names, never argue, let the other person feel the idea is theirs.
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