Dan Allosso Book Club Reading List

Those interested in the current book selections generally meet every Saturday morning from 8:00AM-10:00AM (Pacific) to discuss one or more chapters of a book via Zoom while enjoying a beverage of our own choosing. New members are welcome. To join and get access to the Zoom links and the shared Obsidian vault we use for notes and community communication, ping Dan Allosso with your email address. Members vote on future book selections. 

Below is the list of books (and a few articles) we’ve previously read during the Dan Allosso Book Club since we started in the fall of 2021:

  • Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. 1972. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  • Ahrens, Sönke. 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space.
  • Allen, Roland. 2023. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. United Kingdom: Profile Books. https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-notebook-rolad-allen/6331084.
  • Allosso, Salvatore, and Dan Allosso. 2019. A Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
  • Blair, Ann M. 2010. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
  • Desmond, Matthew. 2023. Poverty, by America. 1st ed. New York: Crown.
  • Doctorow, Cory. 2023. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con.
  • Doto, Bob. 2024. A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly – A Zettelkasten Primer. 1st ed. New Old Traditions. https://amzn.to/3ztjrfb.
  • Duncan, Dennis. 2021. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. 1st ed. London: Allen Lane. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543.
  • Formisano, Ronald P. 2015. Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Freeland, Chrystia. 2012. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Penguin. https://amzn.to/4krZmJ5.
  • Graeber, David. 2021. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Updated and Expanded. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing. https://amzn.to/3MPHKaZ.
  • Graeber, David. 2023. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Graeber, David, and Rebecca Solnit. 2024. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .: Essays. ed. Nika Dubrovsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. https://amzn.to/3O5S6DF.
  • Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything.
  • Hao, Karen. 2025. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Press. https://amzn.to/4o92MBs.
  • Hart, Keith, Jean-Louis Laville, and Antonio David Cattani, eds. 2010. The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. 1st ed. Malden, MA; Cambridge, UK: Polity. https://www.amazon.com/Human-Economy-Keith-Hart/dp/0745649793.
  • Hayek, F. A. 2010. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, The Definitive Edition. ed. Bruce Caldwell. University of Chicago Press.
  • Isenberg, Nancy. 2016. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. 1st ed. New York, New York: Viking.
  • Johns, Adrian. 2023. The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Joy, Bill. 2000. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired 8(4). https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/.
  • Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. https://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Indigenous-Scientific-Knowledge/dp/1571311777.
  • Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. 2023. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books.
  • Lacy, Tim. 2013. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.
  • Lanier, Jaron. 2013. Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster. https://amzn.to/3YzotPZ.
  • Lipsky, David. 2023. The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
  • Mattei, Clara E. 2022. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html.
  • Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2023. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Paul, Annie Murphy. 2021. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Extended-Mind/9780544947580.
  • Piketty, Thomas. 2022. A Brief History of Equality. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674273559.
  • Pinker, Steven. 2025. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. New York: Scribner.
  • Rank, Mark Robert, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. 2021. Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Scheper, Scott. 2022. Antinet Zettelkasten: A Knowledge System That Will Turn You Into a Prolific Reader, Researcher and Writer. 1st ed. Greenlamp, LLC.
  • Schmidt, Johannes F. K. 2018. “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.” Sociologica 12(1): 53–60. doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8350.
  • Wilkerson, Isabel. 2023. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. 1st ed. New York: Random House. https://amzn.to/40KnGyB.
  • Winchester, Simon. 2023. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. New York: Harper. https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063142886/knowing-what-we-know.
  • Wright, Alex. 2014. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

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