Non-Fiction Books People Should Read

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Utz - Bruce Chatwin

Experience - Martin Amis

Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir - Melanie McGrath

These "should" be read, if you like charming memoirs

One Who Walked Alone. By Novalyne Price Ellis.

Biography of author Robert E. Howard's final years before his tragic suicide, by the woman he had for a time been involved with. She does away with the posthumous psychobabble that has been attached to Howard by L. Sprague De Camp that he had had some sort of Oedipal complex that wouldn't allow him to live without his dying mother. Instead, she paints a convincing picture of a lonely, angry and misunderstood young man who had a lifelong struggle with depression, who she, unlike De Camp, actually knew.

My Dark Places. By James Elroy.

Part autobiography of author James Elroy involving his troubled early life as a petty criminal and addict, part biography of his mother, a murder victim whose death had set him on that troubled life, and how he had sought to find her murderer years later. Very sad, often uncomfortable account.

Philosophy:

Plato, The Phædo and The Republic

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)

Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, The Belgian Essays (1842-1843)

JS Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)


Biographies:

Anne Lister, personal diaries (1806 - 1840)

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903)

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1946)

Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (1977)

Karen Levine, Hana's Suitcase: A True Story (2002)

The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (2006)

Anything and everything by Oliver Sacks
Lies My Teacher Told Me

Nothing is true and everything is possible;
This is not propaganda - adventures in the war against reality;
Both by Peter Pomerantsev, a British-Russian TV-journalist who worked as a reality-TV producer in Russia during the 00's, and has since become writer and leader of an information-warfare thinktank at tge London school of economics.

The first book is a memoir of his time in Russia and the bizarre world the media there have created, the second book is an account of the bizarre world the media -and social media- are creating niw globally.
It's about the colour-revolutions, troll-farms, dictators and teenagers who help get dictators into office. It's about how Facebook us being used to make Americans into conspiracy theorists.

Both books are deeply, deeply disturbing. Amd they made me pay for a decent newspaper subscription.

I’m not 100% sure of saying anyone should read any given book in particular, so I’m just going to list some books that have been more influential in how I conceptualise the whole situation than others, but officially forswearing the should aspect.

Philosophy
(Inc. economics, social studies & political theory)

Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle
Politics Aristotle
Dialogues, Essays and Letters Seneca the Younger
Discourses Epictetus
Meditations Aurelius
Praise of Folly Erasmus
Leviathan Hobbes
A Treatise of Human Nature Hume
Wealth of Nations Smith
Critique of Pure Reason Kant
On War Clausewitz
Capital Marx
Human, All Too Human Nietzsche
The Pursuit of the Millenium Cohn
Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises Shaikh
Why Grow Up? Neiman
Debt: The First 5000 Years Graeber

Sciences
(Which I probably don’t read enough of)
Chaos Gleick
Deep Simplicity Gribbin
Origin of Species Darwin
The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins
The Symbolic Species Deacon

History
(With current affairs tacked in the end)

The City in History Mumford
Harvard history of China Various (6 volumes)
The Peloponnesian War Thucydides
The Roman Revolution Syme
Decline & Fall... Gibbon
From Dawn to Decadence Barzun
Rise & Fall... Kennedy
Crescent & Cross Bicheno
Europe’s Tragedy Wilson
Nations & Nationalism since 1780 Hobsbawm
Defence of the Realm Andrew
A People’s Tragedy Figes
Third Reich Burleigh
Bloodlands & Black Earth Snyder
The Five Giants Timmins
Chavs Jones
No Logo & Shock Doctrine Klein
Captive State Monbiot

Well, if we are including philosophy, I have to mention Robert Persig. "Lila" is the sequel to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," answering the correspondence it generated and expanding greatly on the theme. Both are probably semi-fictional narratives, but only as a scaffold for the philosophy.

Hmmm, well if Philosophy In novelistic form is accepted then:

Devils
The Brothers Karamazov

Both by Dostoyevsky
(I know: all will be shocked that a guy with my handle posts works by that particular author)

R. D. M Shaw - The Blue Cliff Records

Katsuki Sekida - Two Zen Classics

J. Krishnamurti - Commentaries on living: series 2

Most of my favourite non-fiction books I first found at the library, then got my own copy for leisurely re-reading. Couple of stand-outs:
"The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey" by Chris Beard. Non-dumbed-down paleontology book about primates of the Eocene.
"The Scramble for Africa" by Thomas Pakenham. Dissects the wave of European colonisation in Africa from 1880 to 1914 with an impressive level of objectivity.
"Restless Creatures" by Matt Wilkinson. A bit of a change from popluar science's obsession with genetics, this is about the biology of movement- from bird aerodynamics to the biochemistry of muscle cells.
"The Planet Factory" by Elizabeth Tasker. Best thing I've ever read about exoplanets, both for range and depth.