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There's some threads already about specific types of non-fiction like history books or biographies, but there's a lot of topics out there, and not all of them will have enough interest to maintain a thread by themselves, so post about 'em here! Here's a few cool books to kick it off: The Decipherment of Linear B, by John Chadwick. It's a book about how people figured out that the writing they were digging up from bronze age Crete was actually Greek, written by one of the key figures in the process only a few years after it happened. Short and easy to read. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a little hard to describe what it's saying, which is weird for non-fiction, but that's because it tries to sell you on the interrelatedness of ideas about mathematics, intelligence, music, biology, and a number of other topics, all through the lens of logical rigor and formal systems. Some of the stuff especially on intelligence is out of date compared to modern research (it was written in the 70s) but all the stuff on math and logic and music is timeless and entertainingly presented. I have this book to thank for a great deal of my understanding of how math actually works. Those were both STEM-related books but feel free to talk in this thread about any non-fiction on a topic you don't think can support a thread on its own. Most of my non-fiction reading is about history which already has its own thread but I'm eager to see what people post on topics I hadn't even considered reading about.
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Apr 2, 2023 08:17
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I frequently buy non-fiction books because the subject matter looks interesting and then never end up reading them because I find fiction more immediately compelling. Here is a list of some of the books I own and have not read: The Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Richard Fidler The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf Resurrection Science by MR O'Connor The Information by James Gleick The Bush by Don Watson The Greatest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe Liberty: The lives and times of six women of revolutionary France by Lucy Moore White Mountain by Robert Twigger The Water Book by Alok Jha Please, feel free to read any of these and then come back and tell me why I should read them. Maybe I will even take your recommendation. There is one non-fiction book I bought and then did actually read and enjoyed very much, called The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright. It is about the Eureka Rebellion, an insurrection in the goldfields of Victoria, Australia in the 1850s, focusing on the women who were involved. edit: I keep spotting more books on my shelves that I haven't read. This is too shameful. I have to stop listing.
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Apr 2, 2023 08:31
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My standard non fiction books I always recommend Debt - the first 5000 years. Incredible book about how we ended up here, with capitalism Against the Gods - a history of risk. Fascinating, but a bit dry A Brief history of time - Hawking's classic. I had to read it a couple of times to fully get it Fiasco - overview of some of the biggest Hollywood flops Riverman - the hunt for the Green River Killer, with help from Ted Bundy Men, Women and Chainsaws - a look at the impact of horror movies from the 70s onwards, particularly the final girl trope The Pig that wants to be eaten - overview of some of the classic thought experiments Where the money is - incredible book about bank robberies in LA. How and why so many happened, and detailed descriptions. Some are insane and I don't know why they haven't been made into documentaries or movies Bullshit Jobs - we were supposed to be working about 2 days a week by now, with all the technology we have. But we're not, and loads of people are working "non-jobs"
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Apr 2, 2023 12:22
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Homicide - A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon (of The Wire). This is one of the best true-crime books ever written, it is frequently bleak, funny, sad, frustrating, and satisfying all on the same page. It takes us through the year in a shift of the Baltimore Police Homicide Unit while the successfully and unsuccessfully try to solve some of the many murders that happen in a cold, miserable violent city. As mentioned, the book is far funnier than the subject matter would initially seem to allow, but it never stoops to making light of the victims or the violence, the humor comes from the detectives and their jaded world-views. If you've watch Homicide: Life on the Street or The Wire, you'll see exactly where Simon's fictional characters took lots of inspiration from. Honestly, it is one of my all-time favorite books and every day you are not reading it is a mistake on your part, this should be a priority for you.
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Apr 2, 2023 13:26
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I'm gonna once again rep A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon. It covers famous stuff like Julius Caesar getting killed, but also more every day murders that are only known because families that shelled out for tombstones wouldn't put like "Beloved daughter" or "Loving husband" on them but would instead engrave things like "Tossed off a bridge by that shitbastard she married" or "Run over by a cart after his business partner laid a curse on him". Also some of the asides she decides to discuss are wild, like this one about Cato the Elder:  
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Apr 2, 2023 14:12
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Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air an incredible piece of explanatory and educational writing, the (sadly deceased) author explains seemingly complex topics in a way that makes the results seem like the most obvious and natural thing in the world. Read this to avoid making basic errors when talking about energy production, and see past the trendy topic of the day. e: it's also 100% free on the linked website distortion park fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 2, 2023 |
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Apr 2, 2023 17:18
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Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson). What are "nations" and how did they come into being? When did this process happen? Later than you might (and certainly than I did) guess! This is a book that dramatically changed how I approached thinking about history.
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Apr 2, 2023 17:34
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The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, was very influential for me, even if I didn't fully understand every part of it when I read it. I've been meaning to re-read it, but haven't 'gotten around to it yet.Amphigory posted:Debt - the first 5000 years. Incredible book about how we ended up here, with capitalism I really want to read these. David Graeber is cool.
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Apr 2, 2023 17:49
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Amphigory posted:Where the money is - incredible book about bank robberies in LA. How and why so many happened, and detailed descriptions. Some are insane and I don't know why they haven't been made into documentaries or movies I looked into this after reading the same. It seemed to me so many of them have been written up and tried to be made even, but the production of most cop films requires depicting the police in a sympathetic or successful light because they won’t lend out any equipment and might make shooting ‘difficult’ otherwise.
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Apr 2, 2023 17:54
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I always recommend Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago. very well reseached and extreamly pulpy in a good way. also Capones constant bitching reminds me alot of trump and poo poo.
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Apr 2, 2023 20:31
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BeastOfTheEdelwood posted:
In my opinion, Debt is the better book, but they're both great Grassy Knowles posted:I looked into this after reading the same. It seemed to me so many of them have been written up and tried to be made even, but the production of most cop films requires depicting the police in a sympathetic or successful light because they won’t lend out any equipment and might make shooting ‘difficult’ otherwise. Huh, that is interesting That heist where the robbers were tooled up with body armour, and cops just could not take them down, definitely makes the cops look loving useless
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Apr 3, 2023 12:48
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I'm currently reading 'World in a Grain' which is a book about sand.
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Apr 4, 2023 01:35
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Amphigory posted:In my opinion, Debt is the better book, but they're both great Those robberies were used to justify SWAT teams across the nation while SWAT teams were entirely ineffective at touching them. That couldn't have happened with a big hollywood film around it.
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Apr 4, 2023 01:42
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Plebian Parasite posted:I'm currently reading 'World in a Grain' which is a book about sand. A while back I read that book about the history of salt. It's called Salt.
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Apr 4, 2023 01:54
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Cthulu Carl posted:A while back I read that book about the history of salt. Lol I've actually read Salt, it's pretty good. Kurlansky's done a number of deep dives on common comestibles, his other books are 'Cod' and 'Milk!'. A really good one I've been meaning to read that's from the same author is 'The Basque History of the World'
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Apr 4, 2023 04:03
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Plebian Parasite posted:Lol I've actually read Salt, it's pretty good. Kurlansky's done a number of deep dives on common comestibles, his other books are 'Cod' and 'Milk!'. A really good one I've been meaning to read that's from the same author is 'The Basque History of the World' Yeah, I should probably read the others because I remember Salt being very good
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Apr 4, 2023 04:23
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Life on Earth (audiobook version). 10 or so hours of David Attenborough talking about all the variety of living things. 10/10
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Apr 4, 2023 10:32
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"Anne Orthwood's Bastard" is a book about a legal case that took place near where I grew up. Basically in Colonial Virginia, Anne died birth giving twins that were the result of a hookup. One survived. Who should claim the child? I have no interest in the law as a general rule, but I loved this. Whose law prevails? Englands? Local? Commonlaw? Does it matter who knows the judge? Really cool how you get to know a lot of people and a system from 350 year old court records.
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Apr 4, 2023 13:55
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Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. It turns out that what I didn't know about the Lewis and Clark expedition could fit in a very good book.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:00
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Kahn's The Codebreakers, about the history of cryptography and cryptanalysis from the ancient Greeks all the way through the invention of the computer. Apparently in the Victorian era lovers would write messages to each other in ciphers in the classified ads, and some clever people would break the code and send them troll messages
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Apr 4, 2023 15:13
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The Tiger by John vaillant. Absolutely insane true story that almost reads like a fiction and lots of information about one of the coolest animals in the world and insight into life in one of the remote places in the world.
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Apr 4, 2023 15:47
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Friday Night Lights is a book a lot of people who don't like sports have looked past, and that is a massive mistake because the book is incredibly good. It is also funny, heartbreaking, eye-opening and not a book that slobbers all over the idea of high-school football being an all-around great thing for the town. The book is actually a darkly funny character study of an entire town's long-term love affair with high-school football, and how it seems to be only the only event able to provide forward motion in their dusty, tired lives.
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Apr 4, 2023 20:21
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You Can’t Win by Jack Black (1926) is an excellent autobiography of a turn of the 20th century thief. Full of great stories. Even though it’s from a world that’s almost completely alien to a modern reader a lot of the writing about home security, opsec, criminal justice and prison is broadly still relevant.
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Apr 6, 2023 18:02
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Jenny Agutter posted:You Can’t Win by Jack Black (1926) is an excellent autobiography of a turn of the 20th century thief. Full of great stories. Even though it’s from a world that’s almost completely alien to a modern reader a lot of the writing about home security, opsec, criminal justice and prison is broadly still relevant. Does he talk about his battle with Satan for the Pick of Destiny? 
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Apr 6, 2023 18:21
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Carrying The Fire by Mike Collins is one of my favorite autobiographies. He's one of the funniest Apollo astronauts.
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Apr 6, 2023 19:08
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I loved Disrupted by Dan Lyons. It starts as a story about a middle aged tech writer who goes to work for Hubspot and it’s a lot of fun as showing just how insane and superficial tech culture is. A great running joke is that the company doesn’t use its own software despite the software supposedly being for just about exactly what the company should want. And it’s good for that but at some point his bosses appear to panic about him writing that book, and poo poo gets completely insane. I seem to remember at least one of his bosses ends up in jail.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:35
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Jenny Agutter posted:You Can’t Win by Jack Black (1926) is an excellent autobiography of a turn of the 20th century thief. Full of great stories. Even though it’s from a world that’s almost completely alien to a modern reader a lot of the writing about home security, opsec, criminal justice and prison is broadly still relevant. This and No Beast So Fierce are top picks for me. I took a class on "transgressive" literature, like crime books from the criminal's perspective, (Burroughs Junky etc) and those two were the standouts. Also Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim.
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Apr 11, 2023 08:04
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Hand Knit posted:I loved Disrupted by Dan Lyons. It starts as a story about a middle aged tech writer who goes to work for Hubspot and it’s a lot of fun as showing just how insane and superficial tech culture is. A great running joke is that the company doesn’t use its own software despite the software supposedly being for just about exactly what the company should want. And it’s good for that but at some point his bosses appear to panic about him writing that book, and poo poo gets completely insane. I seem to remember at least one of his bosses ends up in jail. Holy poo poo I forgot about that book, it’s a gooder
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Apr 13, 2023 04:01
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Deep Glove Bruno posted:This and No Beast So Fierce are top picks for me. I took a class on "transgressive" literature, like crime books from the criminal's perspective, (Burroughs Junky etc) and those two were the standouts. Also Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim. On a related tangent, The Big Con by David Maurer is also an interesting look at early 20th century crime. Interestingly, one of the conmen mentioned peripherally in it was interviewed decades later, and much worse for wear, by Studs Terkel and griped that the rise of federal law enforcement made those sorts of cons infeasible by the middle of the century, at least at the scales described: practically all them involved some component of mail fraud or wire fraud, instantly making them federal cases. The film The Sting is essentially an unauthorized adaptation (Maurer sued for copyright infringement and they settled out of court).
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Apr 13, 2023 05:25
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A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of Sullivan & Cromwell - 100 Years of Creating Power & Wealth Whether it's Allen Dulles the longest serving CIA director, or Ryne Miller as FTX Head Counsul, Sullivan and Cromwell and their famous alumni have operated outside the law from it's founding in 1800s through today and has a huge impact on society. book doesn't seem to be in circulation anymore but here's link to pdf of full physical page scans; https://ia803001.us.archive.org/18/...Sullivan%20.pdf
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Apr 14, 2023 00:50
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Scum of the Earth - this is kind of like a mini autobiography/personal story so idk if it counts, but it's a really great book. It's Arthur Koestler's story of being in France at the outbreak of war with Germany in WW2 and his experience during the aftermath of the invasion. He wrote it during the war so it's incredibly vivid portrait of a moment.
distortion park fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 10:17
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 A really interesting book about bird intelligence, which is different than ours but not completely alien.  A really interesting book about tree behavior, which is profoundly alien  A history of Hatshepsut's rise to power, well written and mainly interesting for the way it discusses the gaps in our knowledge.  I didn't like this one as much because I didn't like his prose style, but there are some wild stories in here.  A book on how to overcome attachment injuries with your partner. I'm a professional marriage counselor, this one is very, very good.
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Apr 16, 2023 20:20
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thunderdome winner
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Chernobyl Princess posted:
I'm gonna have to check this out because ancient Egypt is cool
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Apr 16, 2023 21:54
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A Libertarian Walks into a Bear Covers the attempts of the Free Town project to make a small new hampshire town into a libertarian paradise in the early aughts. As the title suggests, there are some issues with bears. But this book also just has a ton of interesting characters that are covered well. highly recommend
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Apr 17, 2023 01:01
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My wife of nine years now bought me a copy of The Superorganism by Holldobler and Wilson, unprompted, when it came out and I'm pretty sure that's when I decided to marry her. I love ant. It's a cool fuckin book and Wilson is one of the few sociobiologists who don't eventually veer into evobio and evopsych nonsense, from thence down the race science and calipers-out eugenics lite garbage track that so many of their fuckin field cleave to.
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Apr 17, 2023 02:56
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Chernobyl Princess posted:
I enjoyed this one a lot
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Apr 17, 2023 07:22
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clean ayers act posted:A Libertarian Walks into a Bear oh these guys are such a bunch of loving assholes, they came into our town and messed up our one-room tiny school (and got my good friends mom, who worked their as a teach for like 3 decades, fired) by getting all their lovely libertarian cohorts to show up on a snow day when they knew less people in town would show up to vote, and then voting to cut funding to a ton of stuff to get it shut down and also got our only cop fired, and he was actually a good cop who let teens get away with most stupid teenage stuff and really only cared about keeping people safe. i haven't read this book but i just wanted to give my personal perspective here in case book paints them in a light that is more positive than "these guys are short-sighted selfish idiots" because they were incredibly disruptive and destructive. Thankfully the economic destruction they caused was partially undone, thanks in part to my mostly non-political friend rallying the town in righteous anger (who i am extremely proud of) but still, gently caress the free staters
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Apr 17, 2023 13:05
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Tumble posted:oh these guys are such a bunch of loving assholes, they came into our town and messed up our one-room tiny school (and got my good friends mom, who worked their as a teach for like 3 decades, fired) by getting all their lovely libertarian cohorts to show up on a snow day when they knew less people in town would show up to vote, and then voting to cut funding to a ton of stuff to get it shut down and also got our only cop fired, and he was actually a good cop who let teens get away with most stupid teenage stuff and really only cared about keeping people safe. it definitely does not paint them in a good light. the interesting characters remark was more about some of the other folks who show up.
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Apr 17, 2023 23:34
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Jenny Agutter posted:You Can’t Win by Jack Black (1926) is an excellent autobiography of a turn of the 20th century thief. Full of great stories. Even though it’s from a world that’s almost completely alien to a modern reader a lot of the writing about home security, opsec, criminal justice and prison is broadly still relevant. Can't recommend this one enough. There is a book called Henriette Klauser called Writing On Both Sides Of The Brain which I picked up while looking for good beginners references on how to edit your own writing effectively. It's pretty short and I think everybody should read it and do the exercises if you write as part of your job. The essence of the book is learning how to isolate the process of looking at your writing critically from "just writing," so that you are not constantly interrupting the flow of creative ideas to the page with ideas like "that word choice doesn't sound right," or "that should be pluralized". And when you get in the habit of not interrupting yourself, it has a tendency to eliminate useless critical interruptions like "that's stupid" or "no one will read this" altogether.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:21
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Pepe Silvia Browne posted:Can't recommend this one enough. Interesting, I take it it’s geared more towards creative writing than technical?
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Apr 18, 2023 04:18
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