books.caseyjr.org

About this catalogue

I once surveyed friends and former colleagues, asking them to describe me in one word. The overwhelming response was “no-bullshit.”

If I were to choose, I would say, “bibliophile.”

I love books. They foster learning, empathy, and critical thinking, while anchoring focus in a world teeming with distraction.

I'm drawn to history, and to books that explain how systems work—be they economic, political, cultural, natural, or technological. However, as the years go by, I find myself returning to literature more frequently.

I created this project as a personal reading catalogue to share with friends and the world at large. It is a non-exhaustive record of ~700 books. While I ran out of steam uploading the back catalogue, I plan to keep it updated going forward.

Excluded are countless works of literature and pop fiction, as well as hundreds of titles I’ve forgotten after donating them to local libraries, Goodwill, and my Little Free Library.

There are also bound to be a few gremlins and data errors in the catalog. If you spot an error, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or send me an email.

Books marked with a ★ are ones that I recommend to any visitor.

Themes

The themes are my own loose categories, not an attempt at rigorous classification. There are 11 buckets:

  • Fiction: literature, novels, short stories
  • History: historical works and historiography
  • Politics & Economics: political theory, economics, finance, markets
  • Science & Technology: science writing, technology, engineering
  • Philosophy: philosophy, ethics
  • Religion: theology, spirituality, religious texts
  • Reportage: investigative journalism, narrative non-fiction
  • Travel: travel writing, not guidebooks
  • Biography
  • Essays & Lectures
  • Poetry

How it's built

The catalogue is managed with a SQLite database and Python scripts, then exported to a static site built with Eleventy. Book metadata is enriched from OpenLibrary and Google Books.

The code is available on GitHub if you would like to build something similar.

Elsewhere