A Rainbow of Books by flickr user Dawn Endico
At the end of February I’ll be heading to Japan for a couple of months – introducing the baby to her Japanese family – and I am likely to spend most of that time in a suburban town outside of Tokyo. I’ll have the usual stuff to keep me busy, jogging, a little baby, trips into the city and the rest, but travelling around the country out because of the baby, plus I’ve seen a lot of it already. So I reckon I’m going to have to kick my reading up a notch or two to keep from getting too bored. I can speak Japanese, but trying to read book in Japanese would be a futile exercise and my past experience - I lived in Tokyo for a year and a half during college - has been that English books tend to be expensive there, so I’ve got to get them before I leave.
Here’s the list of non-fiction books I’ve acquired and will bring with me:
- Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I’ve heard this is a good read, and pretty informative.
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Ben Schiendelman lent me this about a week after I met him, and it was a great read. I’m going to take the opportunity to read this again.
- The Electric Interurban Railways in America by George Hilton. This was recommended to me at a meet-up by someone, and I’ve always been interested in the Interurbans.
This list is pretty short. I’ve ramped up to a book or two a week these days, and I imagine I can do twenty to twenty-five in the eight weeks I’ll be over there, plus two for the flights there and back. My rule is that I alternate reading fiction and non-fiction, so I really ought to have at least eight or nine more non-fiction books to bring over. Any recommendations? I’m particularly interested in books on transportation, transit or urban planning. I’m less interested in the sort of Geography of Nowhere books that are only condemnations of cars – I already know that story, and it’s kind of depressing - but if someone has a recommendation for a book that has convincing ideas about how to improve and promote sustainability and walkability in suburban neighborhoods that would especially welcome.
* blog + beg = bleg.
Check out “Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan”. It isn’t completely transportation related, but it does discuss on urban policy and transportation spending, and since you’re going to be in Japan, it’ll be worth it I bet.
I bought a book at the New York Transit museum about building the subway, that’s a good one. I’ll write the title here when I get home.
Two months? What do you get laid off?
No, I didn’t. I’m going on Paternity leave.
Layoffs aren’t funny.
Three suggestions I have:
722 Miles by Clifton Hood
A history of the NYC subway system
Transportation for Livable Cities by Vukan Vuchic
A well written book that clearly lays out the arguments, from an engineer’s perspective, of why transit makes so much sense when it comes to urban mobility.
The Great Society Subway by Zachary Schrag
A history of the Washington Metro system. Sheds a lot of light onto the federal decision making process for both urban planning and transit related issues.
I haven’t read any good transit books. But I do keep a list of all of the books I’ve read in the past 5 years or so. At the risk of overwhelming the comment section, here of my favorites (the Erik Larson books and Winterdance are the only non-fiction).
Winterdance
Hilarious fast-moving book about someone who decides one day to race dogs in the Iditarod.
Time Traveler’s Wife
Great book. Love story with the help of science fiction.
Middlesex
The most rich and well-written book I’ve read.
All Over Creation and
My Year of Meats
Ruth Ozeki does a wonderful job of writing interesting and hilarious stories. High environmental value.
Absolute Friends
Great spy novel.
City of Glass
Detective/identity novel. You’ll have to read it to know what I mean.
All the Names
Well written and interesting.
The Devil and the White City
Isaac’s Storm
The two best history books I’ve read. Erik Larson writes like fiction.
Kite Runner
Very good story about Afganistan
A Million Little Pieces
Requium for a Dream of books. Painful, yet impossible to put down.
Prague
Oddly enough, about Budapest. Great character development – I missed them when the book was over.
Interpreter of Maladies
Good set of stories about India.
The Power of One
Wonderful book. It’s about an boy in South Africa trying to get by. Quite a few levels of discrimination occur around him and to him (Boer v. English, Apartheid, etc.). A fairly thick book, but by the time you near the end you wish it were longer. There are no slow parts, and every character is rich with detail to the point that I feel like I know them.
The Memory of Running
A man without motivation in his life suddenly decides to hop on his bicycle and ride across the country. A very good story. The characters are all interesting and flawed.
Veronika Decides to Die
Wonderfully interesting circumstances, plotline, and characters. Fairly quick read, and I was sad when it ended so soon.
The Diamond Age
Fabulously bizzare yet logical look at the future, complete with a thrilling story line.
Pompeii
A quick read, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. It’s the story of an engineer in Roman times, and his life right around the time of the eruption. The description of life in Roman times seems remarkably like modern life.
The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand was a fabulous author, and was wonderfully insightful. Forget about all of the anti-socialist love she’s received over the years, and just read them (at least the Fountainhead, which has nothing to do with the anti-government issues she’s loved for). If you read them both, read them in order.
One more I somehow missed – it’s a mind-opening non-fiction about complexity and complex adaptive systems (the human mind is a complex adaptive systems, as are governments and the evolution of a butterfly). The Quark and Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann.
I’ve actually read city of glass as part of the New York Trilogy. That book is pretty nuts. If the nobel literature committee ever goes back to reading American Novelists, Auster is assured the nobel prize.
“Cradle to Cradle” is fantastic – it’s about industrial design, and thinking about waste in terms of input for other processes. It shows where we’ll need to go when we start running out of resources.
Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” is all about designing various levels of our society to be human-friendly. There are things in there that I don’t agree with, but the reasoning behind them is sound – he basically just considers the way people interact with their surroundings to be of paramount importance. He keeps things in perspective for me, and I often judge places based on his patterns.
Alain de Botton’s “The Architecture of Happiness” explores the way style in architecture makes us operate as humans. It’s a higher-level way of explaining some of the things Alexander does.
I know those last two aren’t about transit, but they apply. I don’t think it’s possible to really grok transit without also understanding land use, and to a large extent architecture.
I agree. In a lot of ways, land use around stations and throughout cities is more important for the success of a transit system than technologies or travel times.
Do you have transit maps of the world? It’s not serious reading but seeing how these systems evolved pictorially can be really illuminatingm.
I travelled for three weeks in Japan with my in 1997. After six months of once-a-week Japanese at the WAL in Pioneer Square. It was a blast. Beautiful place, easy to get around, exciting city life, and lot’s of reminders of the imperial past. My best transit story involves going from the pacific coast of the Chiba Peninsula (where we were camping on the beach) to home in Seattle and only setting foot in an automobile for the last five miles (from SeaTac to West Seattle! Rode a one-car diesel commuter train from the middle of nowhere, transferred to the regional JR rail, and then again to the shinkansen to Narita. Arrived on the airplane with sand still in our shoes. Saw a really cool suspended monorail in Chiba (City) and wondered at the time why couldn’t we get one in Seattle? Makes me laugh now to think about it.
Have fun, Andrew.
Some time I’ll write a post to tell the story of the sheishun juuhachi kippu. I traveled from Tokyo to Kagoshima and back up the coast on the Sea of Japan side to Sapporo, and back down to Tokyo on the Pacific ocean side entirely on local trains.
I was an exchange student in Fukuoka (largest city on the south island, Kyushu). “Sheishun Juuhaci Kippu” translates to “Youth 18 Ticket” for historical reasons, but it can be used by anyone. For roughly $100 you get a ticket that can be stamped 5 times. Each stamp is worth unlimited rides on local or rapid trains for a full day (not express trains or shinkansen). I went to Nagasaki one day, then overnight to Kyoto, then Tokyo, then back to Fukuoka, then to Hiroshima and back.
Sorry, I submitted the above half-baked post so I could go get baby into the wrap. Speaking of which, as a fellow parent of young children I find audiobooks are handy to keep on the ipod! I’m not sure how many of these are available, but you can get one free book for a new account at audible.com/monkeys/ if you want. Since you’ve got a little time, check out SPL’s audiobook selection too. Most are CDs that you can rip and take with.
Here’s some you might want to read:
Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Roads and Rail – Stephan Goddard
Zoned Out: Jonathan Levine
20th Century Sprawl: Gutfruend
Streetcar Suburbs: Sam Bass Warner
City in History: Lewis Mumford
How Cities Work: Alex Marshall
Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place: Logan and Molotch
The Option of Urbanism: Chris Leinburger
The Next American Metropolis: Peter Calthorpe
Design with Nature: Ian McHarg
Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Frumkin and Jackson
A Pattern Language: Chris Alexander
Those should keep you busy…
My gf recommends “Subways of the World”.
This is the sort of story I think will make a great book when it’s all said and done:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062601969.html
I think Bellevue could be a similar story.
If you haven’t yet read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro, you absolutely should. Moses probably shaped US urban design and transportation more than anyone else. And fascinating read on politics as well. But long . . .
If you haven’t read The World Without Us, I highly recommend it. It’s a thought experiment on what would happen to the world if humans suddenly disappeared. Particularly interesting is the author’s description of the rapid demise of New York City, due largely to the underground subway system.
And I second Cradle to Cradle; great read.
I would second “How Cities Work” by Alex Marshall, and also recommend these two:
The Transit Metropolis by Robert Cervero
Suburban Nation, the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
Those three form an awesome triangle of Urban Design theory that perfectly prepare you to be an armchair planner. The great thing is, these three authors strongly disagree with each other at times. I believe the truth lies in the nexis between their perspectives.
I would also recommend some of Jane Jacobs less famous, but still excellent works including:
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
The Economies of Cities
Dark Age Ahead
The Nature of Economies
Have a great trip Andrew.
Ben lent me the Economies of Cities too (he knows good books), which I thought was extraordinarily fascinating.
I’ll check out the other Jane Jacobs books too. Thanks!
I’d recommend The Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch. It’s a classic study from 1960 on how we understand our cities and what that suggests for urban planning.
I’ll also second the recommendation for Lewis Mumford’s The City In History, which actually I never finished reading and ought to go back and do.
Nonfiction, but nontransit related recommendations… Tom’s Friedman’s The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded are both good books and fairly easy and entertaining. If you haven’t read Guns, Germs and Steel – another great book, but it may slow you down if you are trying to get through 20-25. Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma is definitely worth reading as are his other books.
Here are few slightly more esoteric suggestions:
Either of Stephen Inwood’s books on London: “City of Cities” or “A History of London” are excellent as is Adrian Tinniswood’s “His Invention So Fertile: A Life Of Christopher Wren”. All 3 deal w/ the extraordinary challenges of pre-20th Century urban planning (or not planning) in what was then the world’s largest city.
“The Reluctant Mr Darwin” by David Quammen and “Alfred Russel Wallace – A Life” by Peter Raby are bios of 2 of the 19th Century’s greatest minds who challenged the conventional wisdom in ways those of us who favor transit can hardly imagine.
Donna Leon’s series of novels which take place in Venice are as much about the city as they are about Inspector Brunetti and his job and family. Michael Pearce’s “Zapt” novels do the same for the Cairo of 100 years ago.
All excellent books mentioned above,
If youre going to Japan you will want to read…
Old Man Thunder: Father of the Bullet Train (Shinji Sojo) by Bill Hosokawa
I’d like to add to the list…
Rail & Transit
Street Smarts: Streetcars in the 21st Century by Shelley Poticha
Light Rail Transit on the West Coast (1989) by Harre Demoro
Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene by John Stilgoe
Train Time by John Stilgoe
Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: the Construction of Penn Station and its Tunnels by Jill Jonnes
Metropolitan Railways: Rapid Transit in America by William Middleton
Modern Trains and Splendid Stations by Art Institute of Chicago
Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives by John Belle
Urbanism & Placemaking
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte
City: Rediscovering the Center by William H. Whyte
Exploding Metropolis by William H. Whyte & Jane Jacobs
Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl
Global City Blues by Daniel Solomon
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
Great Streets by Allan Jacobs
City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village by David Sucher
City Life by Witold Rybczynski
The Look of Architecture by Witold Rybczynski
Robert A.M. Stern’s New York Series (1880, 1900, 1930, 1960, 2000)
Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950
The Charter of the New Urbanism by Congress for the New Urbanism
Architecture of Humanism by Geoffrey Scott
Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition by Jeff Byles
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America by Anthony Flint
American Ruins by Camilo Jose Vergara
Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods: Design for Environment and Community by Cynthia Girling
Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature by Douglas Farr
A Theory of Architecture by Nikos Salingaros
Anti-Architecture & Deconstruction by Nikos Salingaros
You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore by Charles Moore
American Vitruvius: An Architects Handbook of Civic Art by Werner Hegemann & Elbert Peets
Since you are going to Japan, may I suggest my favorite novelist, Haruki Murakami, a Japanese author who has his own obsessions with American culture. Reading Murakami for the first time while in Japan, and being from America- I would jump at the chance. Start with “Hard Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World” and work up to “Wind Up Bird Chronicle.”
Non Fiction: For sustainability: “How Building Learn” by Stewart Brand. Changed the way I looked at buildings. The pragmatism is easily applied to cities. I also second Jane Jacobs.
For history: Warren Wing’s two books on the Seattle region’s interurban lines: “To Seattle by Trolley” and “To Tacoma by Trolley.” They are somewhat miss-named (not about streetcars but interurbans) but essential. You probably have read them already, but if not, it is time.
I work at Powell’s, the big bookstore to the south. If you need any help rounding up your titles, I can be reached at dan.haneckow@powells.com
Have fun in Japan! -Dan
Have fun, Andrew. Japan is such a fun place to visit!
The Death and Life of *Great* American Cities is a really good book. You’ll enjoy it!
Corrected, thanks. I’ve read it once already, but I figured I’d give it a second go.
Wow, Jon, I’ll have to dig into that reading list.
Back in 1965 Charles Small published Rails to the Rising Sun (Golden West). If you can get it under $30, you won’t be disappointed. The rest of youse guys, give Andrew a few days to decide before you snap up what’s available on the web.
Usually when I travel I try to choose a paperback (lighter and smaller) that’s idea dense. Fernand Braudel wrote a three-volume “History of the World” and the first two volumes, which actually take a deep and global view of the world c 1500, bear repeated readings. (The ‘History of the World nomenclature may be a bit of mistranslation or something, as Braudel makes it clear from the git-go that this is a look at the world in about the 15th-16th centuries.) These can be a bit HTF but maybe Dan who works at Powells could help you get it sorted.
Uh, maybe I should say, if you can find the Braudel, just start with volume one. There’s plenty there to keep the brain occupied.
I would agree that Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of American Cities is a must read.
I really enjoyed Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis. Dead Cities is another good book as well. Both are great for amateur urban planners.
Another great book is The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau. It is almost 30 yrs old, but very relevant today. Also his Edge Cities is a well written book on suburban cities.
I really can’t recommend these books for travel, they’re big heavy books. But they’re a good cornerstone for any transit fan’s library, three books by William Middleton published by Kalmbach back in the 60s. As I recall, the titles were Time of the Trollies, Age of the Interurbans, and When the Steam Roads Electrified.
I know, kinda vague, but you’ll probably have to work with a good bookseller anyway to get hold of these, when you find the guy who can get them for you, he’ll know what you want.
Ok, The Time of the Trolley and The Interurban Era are easily available on Abebooks. When the Steam Railroads Electrified, not so much.
[...] afternoon, I asked for help finding books about transit and urban planning to read on my upcoming sojourn in [...]
What about the book on which Blade Runner is based?