A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others. There’s also a bias toward the recent, and I haven’t shied away from the idiosyncracies of my reading habits (that is, there are plenty of comics and plenty of French books on the list—not to mention at least one French-language comic). Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful to other folks looking for a book to read in these domains!

I picked this book up on a whim at a Nashville bookstore over the summer. It surprised me that I felt drawn to the book—I know who Wheaton is, but I’m not a super fan; the book was an expensive new hardback; and I usually am more hesitant about buying things than grabbing something on a whim.

I did really feel drawn to the book, though. I had recently started reading Wheaton’s blog, I admire his EFF-style thinking, I know he’s been an advocate for mental health, and I was intrigued by the conceit of revisiting a 20-year-old memoir and annotating it with two decades of further growth and hindsight.

I am very near the end of Wil Wheaton’s updated/annotated memoir Still Just a Geek, which I bought over the summer on a short family trip. I have lots of thoughts—most of them positive—about the memoir and may write a bit more about it once I finally finish. For now, though, since I wrote last week complaining about companies like Apple and ClassDojo restricting hardware and software to support their bottom line at the expense of users, I was struck by a short passage Wheaton included making a case for general purpose computing: