David Weeks

Product/Industrial Designer / United States / David Weeks Studio

David Weeks’s Book List

When asked to make a list of my favorite books, these are the titles that immediately came to mind. Once completed, I realized there wasn’t a single design book on the list.

I’ve found that whether it’s a minor character in The World According to Garp who has halitosis and is described as “dying from the inside out” or Sartre’s description of finding his hand on a doorknob in Nausea, the fleeting imagery created from reading a well-written sentence is an act of design in itself.

2 books
Primo Levi
Translated from Italian by Raymond Rosenthal

This was required reading for the classes I taught at Parsons, in 1999–2004. The final chapter on carbon is so insightful and makes our relationship with the planet captivating. I think it makes a better case for reincarnation then any religious text I have ever read. To me, it made faith in science much more compelling and beautiful then any belief systems rooted in fables.

Bobby Seale

Seale can be an uneven writer, but the tales of the Huey Newton and the formation of the Black Panthers are fantastic. My favorite is about Newton traveling around Berkeley, California, with a rifle in his car (which was legal in the 1960s, provided it was licensed and wasn’t loaded). Whenever the police pulled him over, he would respectfully get out of the car, pull out the rifle, and load it while he spoke calmly to the police.

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