mimi10v3This is a working map of a reading life: books I’ve finished, browsed, kept close, or still mean to explore. The shelves are a personal taxonomy—less a claim about what a book objectively is than a record of which ideas I expect to find beside one another.
Fiction is the largest territory, but the recurring preoccupations cut across it: intelligence and technology, ecology and evolution, humane buildings and cities, ethics, history, and unusual lives. Ratings record affinity rather than authority; notes explain what stayed with me, and reader recommendations can add new paths through the collection.
A place to begin
Highest rated.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Mimi’s noteI had a tattered yellowed paperback copy as a child, cover held on with scotch tape and sections of pages falling out, I assume I took it from my parents shelves though don't remember a…
10/10Classic Literature : Children'sAn Old-Fashioned Girl
Mimi’s noteMy number one comfort read when I'm sick, the main character Polly has the virtues I've aspired to since first reading it as a young girl.
10/10Modern Literature : Science FictionCryptonomicon
Mimi’s noteOne of my all-time favorite books, I love Stephenson's quirky language and humorous digressions from the multiple main storylines which weave together into a satisfying whole. Manages…
10/10Contemporary Literature : Literary FictionSeiobo There Below
Mimi’s noteOne of my favorite books, one of a kind, just read it.
10/10Built Environment : StructuresStructures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down
Mimi’s noteOriginally, I read this book because it was on Elon Musk's recommendation list, but it is an extremely well written and charming introduction to structural engineering - just the right…
9/10Contemporary Literature : Short StoriesExhalation
Mimi’s noteI originally read this on Kindle, but then found a signed limited edition copy in my local Little Free Library so it is on my bookshelf as well :) best find to date
Keep drilling down
Categories.
Built Environment
→41 books · 7.4 avg
Buildings and cities as habitats for bodies and attention. The collection favors pattern, natural light, biophilia, legible structure, humane scale, and the practical intelligence required to turn an atmosphere into something that stands up.
Contemporary Literature
→84 books · 7.1 avg
Recent fiction with porous borders: literary realism beside climate futures, systems novels, dream logic, and formally strange work. The strongest books here make technological and ecological change feel intimate rather than merely topical.
Modern Literature
→115 books · 7.1 avg
Twentieth-century fiction and its near edges: ambitious novels, formal experiments, historical reckonings, and speculative worlds whose ideas are inseparable from voice. This is the bridge between inherited classics and the literary present.
Classic Literature
→117 books · 6.5 avg
Older stories that still generate weather: social comedy, adventure, childhood wonder, gothic unease, early speculation, and the birth of detective logic. Canon matters here less as duty than as a long-running conversation worth joining selectively.
Meaning
→44 books · 6.8 avg
Attempts to live deliberately under conditions of uncertainty, suffering, obligation, and wonder. Philosophy and sacred traditions share a shelf with animal ethics, contemplative practice, Quaker discernment, and questions about what a good future is for.
Popular Fiction
→213 books · 6.0 avg
Plot-forward books chosen for momentum, attachment, and the pleasure of returning to a world. Long fantasy arcs, ingenious mysteries, thrillers, romances, and speculative adventures live here without needing to apologize for being absorbing.
About a Person
→80 books · 6.6 avg
Lives used as instruments of thought. Memoir, biography, letters, essays, and a few fictionalized portraits show how unusual minds and ordinary selves are formed by work, place, history, conviction, and contradiction.
Nature
→49 books · 6.9 avg
Life across scales, from microbes and mycelium to ecosystems and evolutionary time, with physics holding open the wider frame. Field knowledge sits beside books that ask what other organisms perceive and what obligations follow from kinship.
Practical
→59 books · 5.9 avg
Books meant to leave the page and alter a hand, habit, room, garden, body, or relationship. The standards are usefulness and lived texture: instructions worth keeping nearby, plus a record of experiments tried on the self.
Intelligence
→63 books · 7.0 avg
Minds in all their forms: evolved, embodied, mathematical, social, and increasingly artificial. These books ask how agents perceive, reason, fail, coordinate, and make models of worlds that remain larger than they are.
Technology
→50 books · 6.8 avg
Computation understood as craft, infrastructure, interface, and social force. The shelf moves from algorithms and protocols to the human work of building software—and to the consequences once technical systems escape the room where they were designed.
Humans
→101 books · 6.2 avg
How people arrange collective life—and what those arrangements do to us. Economics, politics, history, institutions, business, crime, and local memory meet here as overlapping systems rather than isolated subjects.
Art
→23 books · 5.8 avg
How form directs attention. Art history, photography, ornament, material design, visualization, and accounts of creative practice gather around a taste for sensuous systems—work where structure and beauty explain one another.
Language
→40 books · 5.7 avg
Words considered as material, performance, picture, argument, and tool. Poetry anchors the shelf, but drama, comics, picture books, criticism, linguistics, and writing guides widen the question of what language can make perceptible.
All books 1081
| Open | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 Eternal Masterpieces of Literature [volume 2] | Various Authors | 2017 | 6 | Read | → |
| 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People | Susan Weinschenk | 2011 | 6 | Read | → |
| 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School | Matthew Frederick | 2007 | 7 | Read | → |
| 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus | Charles C. Mann | 2005 | 8 | Read | → |
| 150 Best New Cottage and Cabin Ideas | Francesc Zamora Mola | 2020 | 8.5 | Read | → |
| 1984 | George Orwell | 2021 | — | Read | → |
| 1Q84 | Haruki Murakami | 2009 | 9 | Read | → |
| 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne | 1870 | 10 | Read | → |
| 2312 | Kim Stanley Robinson | 2012 | — | Unread | → |
| 30-Second Economics | Donald Marron | 2011 | 4 | Read | → |
| 507 Mechanical Movements | Henry T. Brown | 1868 | — | Browsed | → |
| A Better World | Marcus Sakey | 2014 | 4 | Read | → |
| A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | 1988 | — | Read | → |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | 1843 | — | Read | → |
| A Clash of Kings | George R. R. Martin | 1998 | — | Read | → |
| A Dance with Dragons | George R. R. Martin | 2011 | 8 | Read | → |
| A Feast for Crows | George R. R. Martin | 2005 | — | Read | → |
| A First-Rate Madness | Nassir Ghaemi | 2011 | 6 | Read | → |
| A Game of Thrones | George R. R. Martin | 1996 | — | Read | → |
| A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Dave Eggers | 2000 | — | Unread | → |
| A History of Western Art | Laurie Schneider Adams | 1994 | 6 | Read | → |
| A Little Princess | Frances Hodgson Burnett | 1905 | — | Read | → |
| A Long Way Gone | Ishmael Beah | 2007 | 4 | Read | → |
| A Mercy | Toni Morrison | 2008 | 4 | Read | → |
| A Midsummer Night's Dream | William Shakespeare | 1595 | 6 | Read | → |