I’m gonna make a list and hit the library
Against the Grain
Internal Combustion
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
These all caused me to examine aspects of modern society that we usually just accept blindly
Not sure if they all fit entirely but:
- The Story Of Stuff (Annie Leonard)
- How The World Works (Noam Chomsky)
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely)
- The Hidden Brain (Shankar Vedantam) / Idiot Brain (Dean Burnett)
- The Myth Of Choice (Kent Greenfield) / The Paradox Of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
- The Free Will Delusion: How We Settled For The Illusion Of Morality (James B. Miles)
- Getting Free: Creating An Association Of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (James Herod)
- The Best That Money Can’t Buy (Jacque Fresco)
- No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Alfie Kohn)
I’ve been meaning to start reading some Chomsky & Alfie Kohn! Both very revolutionary writers from the reviews I’ve been checking out
Predictably Irrational is really good.
I feel like I read Chomsky’s books at a key point in my life where I didn’t really get all of it but it primed me for later learning. Good list overall 👍🏼
Carl Sagan - A Demon-Haunted World. Explains the key difference between a scientific vs religious mindset.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Reading this (or trying to) is like being on drugs. You go from “What in god’s name is the author smoking?” to some kind of nirvana.
The Tao of Pooh, the Te of Piglet, and the Tao Te Ching.
On Writing - If you want to write and and are able to ignore advice that doesn’t fit your style, I’ve always found this a nice inspiring comfort read (the audiobook is great!)
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Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
I’m gonna say my top non fiction books are:
The Narnia series, who knew that lions could be found in seemingly ordinary closets! Wow!
Harry Potter series, if I had known about hogwarts before i went to college I would definitely have applied there.
And then probably Wikipedia, man there is a lot of info on that book
You really can’t trust Wikipedia as a true non fiction source. People make stuff up in there all the time.
Same with Harry Potter. I don’t say it’s all made up but we have only one source and a biased one at best. She’s a literal terf. Don’t believe anything she says.
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Gotta be “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Every time there was an experiential experiment in the book, I put it down and tried it for myself. I possibly changed more over the course of reading that book than at any other period in my life.
The divide: a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions by Jason Hickel
Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence helped me get better at every relationship in my life.
Can you elaborate a bit? Amazon reviews make it sound more academic and less actionable.
Yes, it’s definitely more academic than practical, but that’s really what I needed. I had read plenty of books that told me what I should do, but not why I’m doing it. By learning the theory I could be more improvisational in my interactions with confidence.
The Five Love Languages - explains the inner workings of love, and how to sustain long term relationships, especially marriage
I read Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain at some point during the First World War centenary. I’m also roughly 100 years younger than Vera Brittain, so I was very close to her age during WW1. I knew the facts of WW1 before, but it hit me really hard to think about a whole generation of young people (of the countries involved) having their youth drowned in a war. And the pointlessness of it all. It made me really grateful for the circumstances I was lucky enough to grow up in.
