George Yabu

Interior Designer; Product/Industrial Designer / Canada; United States / Yabu Pushelberg

George Yabu’s Book List

Jetting between our New York and Toronto offices on a weekly basis, and various project sites around the world (literally), reading is an obvious, but very much beloved pastime. I always like to cover news stories both domestic and internationally based. And I love a variety of books—as long as within the first several pages, the book inspires me, provokes thought, engages my curiosity, and visually delights me. I often take something interesting and new away from each of them, whether a new way of looking at things, or an anecdote to apply to life. This selection is a cross section of my literary interests.

6 books
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Classic must-read for everyone regardless of industry or field of work.

Brian Brace Taylor

Architect Geoffrey Bawa is a true inspiration and his work effortlessly emphasizes nature at its beautiful potential.

Herb Ritts

A twin boxed set of the most iconic work of the Los Angeles-based photographer Herb Ritts who passed away in the 1990s. His very influential work meshed fashion and music through videos—he directed supermodel Helena Christensen with Chris Isaak for the video of Isaak’s song “Wicked Game.” This fabulous book of Ritts’s work is a collection of glamorous pop-culture figures of the 20th century.

Leonard Koren

What I love about this simple book is the philosophical exploration of beauty in impermanence and imperfection. I've always strived to attain the opposite in our work and I know I see the beauty in almost everything seen or unseen.

Paintings by Walton Ford
Essay by Bill Buford

Growing up, I always had a fascination with exotic animal and plant life, as depicted in natural history and botanical drawings that are primarily, still-life portraits of the subject matter. Ford’s watercolor paintings go beyond these scientific and academic portrayals. They burst with saturated color and are richly detailed; often capturing the visceral interactions between species within the animal kingdom. You may witness the terror and stress from the confrontation between a jaguar and a buffalo, but closer inspection reveals there is more to it than basic animal instinct and its natural order.

Aravind Adiga

The themes in this book and those in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment are closely associated through a harrowing, premeditated crime. The two novels were written about a century and a half apart; yet interestingly, the personal moral justifications of their characters’ actions just to get ahead within the rigid societal structure of 19th-century Russia and present-day India run eerily parallel.

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