Richard Reynolds's Top Book Recommendations

Richard ReynoldsYes, I’d love to say that I read this as a child and it’s stayed with me every since, but that would be a lie. I was told about it by an American who had read my website. He actually went to the trouble to send it to me through the post. Although it’s not very big in the UK it’s very well known in the States. The book is the life story of a little girl who grows up and travels around the world.... (Source)

Gary Vaynerchuk[Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned reading this book in a video.] (Source)

Richard ReynoldsWell, the internet is a huge landscape and it’s up to us to plant it with ideas. It’s a wonderfully democratic space, unlike the physical landscape around us. I read this book because it was recommended by a colleague at work and I was inspired to really make the most of the internet. I realised that in parallel with doing the gardening I could also plant my ideas prominently on line. My blog is... (Source)

David SoskinThis explains very clearly why the Google search algorithm outclassed the other search engines of the time. (Source)

Richard ReynoldsYes. This book is inspirational because it’s a collection of stories about how people have created gardens in the midst of war. That includes soldiers on the Western Front building little gardens among their trenches when they got a moment of peace, or the ghettos in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. It shows the power and the need and the hunger for gardens as a respite from the... (Source)

Jeremy TillHungry City shows how architects are far more enmeshed in the world around them than they themselves would like to believe. (Source)

Richard ReynoldsCarolyn Steel carries on the theme of how we use land. She deals with the very current concern that cities today are not sustainable because the hinterlands from which they are fed are running out. The trail that food has to take is enormous and also not sustainable. What Carolyn Steel does is give a fascinating historical perspective. You realise that these problems are nothing new. For example... (Source)

Richard ReynoldsGuerrilla gardening is technically known as illicit cultivation on someone else’s land. But for me, and everyone else involved, we’re very much looking at neglected public land, which we then transform into something more beautiful – through plants, flowers and vegetables. This is something which has taken off all over the world. Although it’s illegal the police have nearly always turned a blind... (Source)