I had a great final day in London, and on the flight home I had lots of time to listen to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was “The Violin” by David Schoenbaum. This is your one-stop-shop for violin chronology, covering the diffusion and evolution of the instrument, the business of its construction and sale, the collector's market, education, and of course performance. Importantly this book spans the globe, although due to the violin's European roots there's obviously less outside that sphere. I would not classify this as a history, as there's very little in the way of analysis, and almost no macro statistics or trends on the different topics the book covers. As a consequence, I can't recommend reading this cover to cover, but rather to use it as a reference to dig into or unearth specific cases https://share.google/96HIPNgbTgwf3tRBx

Last was “Things Fall Together” by Skylar Tibbits. This is a good introduction to the wide class of material fabrication techniques enabling people to use computational tools to embed intelligence into materials. Most of the book consists of listing off techniques and case studies, rather than a more systematic analysis and review. If you're not familiar with this field at all you'll still get a lot out of the book, but if you've read a few articles or listened to a few talks you're probably best off looking elsewhere https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691170336/things-fall-together