Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
• Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.