What's the book that people in your field pretend to have read?
The book is perhaps really dry or long and people kind of act like they've read it, without saying so explicitly. But most haven't read it.
In Computers? The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks
In Mnaagement? Turn the Ship Around David Marquet
In literature? Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
In Philosophy? The Republic Plato
In Religion? The Confessions St. Augustine
In Mathematics? The Elements Euclid
In History? Parallel lives Plutarch
In Physics? Principia Isaac Newton
I somehow feel everyone pretends to have read “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, but whenever I dig deep, most of the time I get to know they just bought the book but watched a video summary (it’s quite a biggie)
Capital in the 21 Century by Thomas Piketty is quite long and dry as there are many facts and figures, but it's essential reading to understand that the United States' 1960s, where people could buy a home, car, got to college etc working a minimum wage job and where people often say they want to return to in the modern day, is instead an anomalous post war boom and that the level of wealth inequality today is actually the norm for most of modern history.
CLRS or some Algorithm Design Book, but you could easily be talking about TAOCP or SICP or Clean Code or any of 1000 other books.
Accelerate - this book has become an excuse for managers to spend outrageous money implementing metrics like lead time and deployment frequency to measure teams, whereas the book actually advises something very different.
The Elements of Statistical Learning
Anything by John Dewey or A
Lev Vygotsky. (Field: education.)
CustomerCentric Selling. Not clear to me if it actually helps but it was excitedly recommended to me.
Anyone else!
Gödel Escher Bach? Or maybe that’s just me!
Gonna get through it one of these days…
The Design of Everyday Things can be a bit of a drag, and it's just my hunch that not many folks bother to read it all the way through.
Frontend software / design. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman.
It's incredible the number of people who use the words "affordance" and "signifier" incorrectly.
In software:
Could plausibly have read, but also likely to blindly recommend without having read them (I've done that myself, only ever skimmed either): The Mythical Man Month, Code Complete.
Very unlikely to have read: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. (I'm moderately sure Donald Knuth has read these, but beyond that, dubious. Personally I've read their titles on a shelf three times now.)
Communications / Media studies: Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan