Books about history and alternative theories?

I have no recommendations for those sort of books because I weed out any pseudoscientific bull from my reading list — and would never recommend people read it.

That said, I am curious: _why are you **intentionally** seeking out bad information?_

Your “no wildly out there stuff” criteria is … weird, because there’s zero “out there” difference between “stories of Atlantis” and “stuff like lizard people.”

Instead, I recommend you just go read some ficiton.

There’s plenty of “secret society” fiction out there, from the literary (e.g. Umberto Eco’s _Foucault’s Pendulum_ or Thomas Pynchon’s _The Crying of Lot 49_ or Don DeLillo’s _The Names_) to good genre stuff (e.g. Charles Stross’ _The Laundry Files_ series or Robert Ludlum’s _Bourne_ series) to various alternate history timelines (e.g. Philip K. Dick’s _The Man in the High Castle_ or Neal Stephenson’s _Cryptonomicon_ or Kazuo Ishiguro’s _Never Let Me Go_) to the popular-but-terribly-written (e.g. Dan Brown’s _The Da Vinci Code_).

You can get the same sort of enjoyment of mystery and conspiracy and revelation while *knowing* it is fiction.

That way you don’t unintentionally (or intentionally) rot your brain and critical thinking ability with fiction that is trying to pass itself off as fact.