Experts > Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Nicholas Carr recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Nicholas Carr's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Super Sad True Love Story

The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant...
more

Whitney CummingsSuper sad but very funny. Well, not super. It’s like a dystopian satire on the future. (Source)

Nicholas CarrI think that novelists, and other artists, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of the Internet, smartphones and all of that. Literature provides a different and very valuable way of perceiving those implications, so I decided to end with a novel. This book is both funny and extremely horrifying. It’s set in a future that is very close in some ways to the present. Shteyngart takes... (Source)

Jennifer M HarrisWhat I like about it is the way Shteyngart takes a pretty wonky concept in geoeconomics and makes it real. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2
A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands

Called "the sleeper hit of the publishing season" (The Boston Globe), Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his...
more
Recommended by Nicholas Carr, and 1 others.

Nicholas CarrWith the last two books I tried to move away from the historical and commercial side to the more personal consequences of the information age. Matthew Crawford’s book is a bit of a surprise in this list, because he doesn’t specifically talk about the Internet. But he does talk in a broad and philosophical way about things which are very important in the information age. That is, the way our... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

3
James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that...
more
Recommended by Nicholas Carr, and 1 others.

Nicholas CarrIf Standage’s is a small book focused on a particular technology and moment in time, Gleick’s is extraordinarily broad and sweeping. It’s a very large book, in which he tries – and succeeds in many ways I think – to tell the story of information in human history. Information breaks down into two different things in essence. On the one hand it is messages – things with meaning to human beings –... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

4
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways. less
Recommended by Nicholas Carr, Rafat Ali, and 2 others.

Nicholas CarrThe reason why I start with Tom Standage’s book is because we tend to think of the information age as something entirely new. In fact, people have been wrestling with information for many centuries. If I was going to say when the information age started, I would probably say the 15th century with the invention of the mechanical clock, which turned time into a measurable flow, and the printing... (Source)

Rafat AliThe not-Internet Internet of early 20th century and its effect on news/newspapers. From “The Victorian Internet” book, utterly fascinating. https://t.co/jP0C4cfkTc (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the...
more

Nicholas CarrWhatever its imperfections, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First... (Source)

Naomi KleinFrom the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process. The hour is late and much has been lost already—but as we learn in these... (Source)

Clive Lewis MpCant make the brilliant event below? Havent had a chance to read @shoshanazuboff groundbreaking book, ‘Surveillance Capitalism’? Then listen to this brilliant interview with the author as she explains the terrifying scale&ambition of Facebook/Google et al https://t.co/DCtNlFbmE0 https://t.co/ZX0YpW5pOo (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

6
In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s... more

Andrew ChenNow starting the section now these information empires eventually got dismantled, by the internet, cable, and the government antitrust efforts on the 1950s! Awesome book so far (Source)

Seth GodinThis one really stuck with me--a top level analysis of how changes in media change the culture and change the structure of industry. (Source)

Nicholas CarrIf The Information is a sprawling, sweeping story of how information has changed over time, one thing it doesn’t get into is the commercial nature of information as a good that is bought and sold. That’s the story Tim Wu tells in The Master Switch. His basic argument is that whenever a new communication medium arises, a similar pattern occurs. The technology starts off as a hobbyist’s passion,... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Nicholas Carr's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.