How + Why to read + Belle's Reading list: Tech, Art, Politics, Classic Literature.

I thought I'd change things up a bit as folks have asked for my recommended reading list, as I am in fact, always cajoling people to go read books instead of getting all their information second-hand from youtubers and shit. Also, I changed up the blog a bit - with new fonts and background, I tried to make sure it's still readable (I do have light dyslexia so I am sensitive to that!). I will include a lot of free books.

Important disclaimer:

Books are read one word at a time. Nobody is expecting you to read the library of Alexandria at once, good lord.

I read fairly consistently when I was working this year 8am-4pm in office and doing professional development 2-3 days a week 6pm-10pm and was doing my consulting for Trueref even just this year. And I did The Artist's Way.

I also have ADHD and Autism, I am poor by all metrics, and went to 10 different schools from K-12 and had severe speech delays until age 4 with no intervention.

I say this because the pushback that I get from people (cough open/source atprotocol developers making tens of thousands a year.) that have been breathing down my neck telling me I'm an elitist condescending bitch because I can cite academic sources/material theory is quite frankly ridiculous and ableist.

I am willing to help any person making a sincere effort to expand their mind even if we end up disagreeing, what I'm not gonna do is babysit people's feelings and make excuses for their laziness.

Talent doesn't exist, only material conditions and effort.

It's okay to struggle with reading or comprehension or take months or even years to finish a book - it happens all the time. It's not okay to give up on critical thinking.

Contrary to popular belief, I didn't finish college - I think it's very deeply dangerous to suggest that folks can only get an education through school - but I do think it's important to encourage people towards that if it works for them.

It's not that I don't believe in public education - I just believe in public libraries a bit more.

and I believe the western University system is actively an imperial force that is a detriment to people's lives, entire communities, and maintains an artificial scarcity of resources by lying about the idea that it is a meritocracy to justify and reify already existing structures of inequality. I just think as a society that we would all be better if we destroyed every single university, folded their research facilities into governmental structures, seized all their public property, and redistributed dorms as public housing and instead had 2 year training apprenticeships with universal housing/food assistance - prosecute college board for war crimes against humanity and put all college prep funding into pre-K, give K-12 teachers tenure, and pay them 100k a year when neuroplasticity is highest. 😇

Anyways I read everything - while I may not always read finished books I also often read speeches, interviews, I also will read scientific papers full stop. I am prone to functionally just having tons of papers and articles and even if I don't read it at that moment, typically I'll capture it (I pay for readwise) and then read it later - sometimes months later.

^I am almost always reading.

I even have research libraries on my computer - Right now they're about game theory/motivational design and traditional Hellenistic astrology. (There's a reason the ADHD/Astrology books are mixed in there too.)

I also will go and read certain books like the Book of Enoch - an extra-canonical Abrahamic biblical text - really I be reading whatever. Being open to reading everything, is exactly why I am so smart, I find commonalities in things folks would never think to and I'm willing to deconstruct my worldview and rebuild it with no information.

Tips for reading more:

1. 1.

   Audiobooks are hella valid. Weirdly I don't care for them but like podcasts, but they can be cool.

2. 2.

   Read literally anything just to get the habit down. Simple books, stuff you like. Then branch out. Give yourself an impossibly simple goal (literally one sentence a day).

3. 3.

   Read immediately when you hear of something - whenever I see a tiktok, youtube video, podcast mentioning a specific book - I'll add it to a list for later. It might be literally years but chances are I'll get back to it.

4. 4.

   It's okay to not finish books if they're too hard, but you might wanna consider continuing on another medium and returning. For example: I find philosophy books on psychoanalysis really intimidating sometimes - Like Lee Edelman's No future - so instead I watched a podcast where he spoke about it (put it on in the background while I played Marvel Rivals) and read the wikipedia lol. I will come back to another day.

5. 5.

   I chase my hard theory with simple shit. Case and point here.

6. 6.

   Just keep reading material always on you. Deadass.

7. 7.

   Libraries. Ik y'all gonna say but my library bad.................... now..... consider that the internet......... might be kind of a library...... >.>

Okay alright without further ado - here's my reading list, imma sort by topic: Productivity, fiction, tech, politics. Some of these I'm still working through in some ways.

Technology reading list:

The first 3 were actually given to me by different mentors in my career and I find them very foundational for my understanding of UX:

• Don't Make Me Think was actually recommended to me by Jared Spool himself (ifykyk if you're in UX, but yes, I was supposed to be in the original cohort of Center Centre's UX apprentices until the Trump administation and the pandemic fucked up my entire life and career path -_-) It's really foundational to understanding UX on a normal people level.

• Six Billion Shoppers was another mentor recommendation by a mentor who runs a design group for Queer people of color - This book is fantastic for understanding design in the global south and non-western countries. I love it. Was really interesting.

• When Kale and Coffee Compete was given to me by my first UX mentor and introduced me to the Jobs to Be Done framework of UX - I think other books have probably really improved on it (rn I'm reading the JTBD Playbook - it's pretty solid and I like the case studies) but I still think this book is still pretty good.

The last book I am going to say: If you read nothing else on this list - please try and read this. I am begging people in tech, even outside of it to read this book - to understand the dynamics of why open source projects are failing.

The Charisma Machine is about a global non-profit project to bring free open-source laptops to impoverished children in the global south, with the hopes that it would encourage them out of poverty - it is the most important book I think any technologist in open source should read, I rarely see anyone talk about. I am begging the developers munching up my ass to go read this.

Art reading list:

Okay so full disclosure: I learn art stuff best by just like... doing it so books aren't really where I learn art. I literally just go in the program and go in and click shit and either break it or come out with a new technique. I don't even know what shit does. I barely learned what a masking layer was until last year LMAO. So when it comes to hard technical skills - I have no hard recommendations, I take courses for that - you can read my art learning blog to see my experience with that:

Belle's AuDHD art chaos learning blog along

me chatting about my adhd art stuff because now my fun art fandom blog is kind of my primary career identification and everyone expects too much outta that, there will be many typos but we will have fun over here

Belle - The wicked witch of atproto

However, I do think there was a few really influential books in my art like:

• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

  @scottmccloud.bsky.social

  - Honestly it explained the theory of sequential comics really, really well. I know that he gives a lot of his theory credit to the Eisner books, and I did try going back to the Eisner books..... but a lot of it was racist caricatures and I was like.... I'm good lmao. I felt that McCloud covered everything without me having to look at The Happy Merchant antisemitic caricatures or minstrel show shit. I also liked how much flowers he gave to shojo for really remaking the game.

• How to Webcomic by

  @thestarfishface.bsky.social

  - Hands down the best and most complete guide on webcomics available, very readable, very good. I read a lot of books on comics prepping for my comic but this was the only good one that actually had real talk about webcomics specifically. An overall good one.

• The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron - Changed my life lol. I talked about it more here, but just trust me on this one.

History/Politics Reading list:

Oh this one might be controversial but fuck it lol. I'm already the wicked witch of ATprotocol. In general - I'd say look at the Black Panther reading list.

But here's my favorites, some from the list, some off of it:

Disclaimer: I do not endorse every single part of these books in fact actually let me directly quote one of them since y'all LOVE taking me out of context - Huey Newton in Intercommunalism - that explains my position and summarizes like, me lmao:

You could easily say, “This method may be successfully applied in one particular instance, but how do you know that it is an infallible guide in all cases?” The answer is that we don’t know. We don’t say “all cases” or “infallible guide” because we try not to speak in such absolute and inclusive terms. We only say that we have to analyze each instance, that we have found this method the best available in the course of our analyses, and that we think the method will continue to prove itself in the future.

We sometimes have a problem because people do not understand the ideology that Marx and Engels began to develop. People say, “You claim to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla or something like that.” The Marxists claim he was only kidding and that the statement shows Marx’s closeness to the man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx was a racist.

Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx’s racism affects your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though, that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” Such Marxists cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past to get answers for the future, and that does not work.

If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx’s racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B. Watson once stated that his favorite pastime was hunting and hanging niggers, yet he made great forward strides in the analysis and investigations of conditioned responses.

^this is your first practice read this 3x over please.

I'm not gonna defend any of these go find them, read them, and come to your own conclusions and stay out of my mentions if you have beef pls and thank you.

Classic Literature Reading List:

Tbh, I don't actually read too much modern literature. I don't know why, I read more non-fiction, I can only really read modern lit when I'm in a good mood, but classical literature is more like... learning something - different place different time and I think I find myself more comfortable with my analytical mind. So I do read a lot here too.

I don't read in a pretentious "oh I'm better than you" way - I like reading classic literature because it's like... oh that's where that comes from. It makes watching and reading other later media richer.

Here's some of my favorites:

I like to think if you've gotten this far you'll respect and trust that I know my shit:

• Lolita I wrote about more extensively a bit back, but I can say now it's one of my favorite books because it allows me to take out my unbridled hater energy on people on HH, and I think it did what it was trying to do really well. I've been on a Russian literature kick lately - reading Anna Karenina and I think it's funny that every single man in Russian literature is just like, I am a total piece of shit with no redeeming qualities and should probably be killed also fuck the french.

• Notes from the Underground: See above about Russian lit.

• The Great Gatsby: I understand that it's considered trite at this point but it's still good af.

• The Bluest Eye: I read this all in one sitting in High school for the first time and I still think it's one of the most harrowing books I've ever read. Looking back at it, it genuinely reminds me a lot of internet lolcow culture - I often say the entire history of ChrisChan is functionally the Bluest Eye if someone shoved it into a blender with something awful and 4chan.

Productivity/Mental Health Reading list:

Now now, while I do abide by the Audre Lorde phrase: "The Master's tools will never dismantle his house." I also believe in the phrase: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them"

And I do not think those two things are in contradiction with each other!

I have to live and breathe in this belly of the beast, after all - the nature of power changes. That's what each of the Black Panthers said, the goal is to go inside the institution and find their tools and understand them. So while I wouldn't agree with a lot of these authors politically - the techniques are sound and I have used them to great effect:

• Driven to Distraction: The best comprehensive book on ADHD imo. Even has little chapter summaries at the end of it if you can't get through the entire book.

• Atomic Habits: also features the quick end of chapter summaries - Literally changed my life - Like a better version of The Power of Habit but with neuro-science and more applicable steps.

• Fair Play by Eve Rodsky: While she's got some questionable neolib politics - and I find her language a tidbit gender essentially - this is basically a literal legal framework for domestic labor negotiation that gives you full scripts on how to talk things through down to rebuttles. It was fairly consequential in my personal relationship with my partner and how to talk through labor disputes in the house.

• Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving by Pete Walker: This book was pretty foundational and life-changing in just straight up explaining what the fuck was wrong with me, and how to start working on it. To be honest - I found the tools in it didn't really make sense to me until I read The Artist's Way, which uses the same sorts of tools but applied to the context of art, and honestly if you have CPTSD and are an artist - read them together. Trust me.

• Getting Things Done by David Allen: This is actually a fairly end to end productivity system in and of itself but I think the core principles pretty much are applicable to a bunch of different systems and there's still parts of it I use all the time for my ADHD like the trigger list (a gigantic list of keywords to try and trigger my memory to remember SHIT I GOTTA FUCKING DO.) Fun fact: this was featured in The Office (US) cuz the author was such a big fan, which I think is cute.

Conclusion: Go read stuff. Stop pretending like I have special powers because I read books, it's embarrassing man. I think most of the eReading apps now will read to you.

If you can't afford these books or can't find them at your local library, I've prepared a special poem for you, ehem:

Down in the red trenches I found a special slum

run by a girl named anna

she archives all the books

Maybe you'll find her too.

Okay that's it, happy reading.

P.S. I've got a guide about how to unrot your brain about building your environment based on UX principles here if you need a sequel too, it includes all the other stuff a library could get you too: