Hey fellow Redditors,
I'm looking for a new non-fiction book to dive into and I want to hear from you. What's the most mind-blowing, thought-provoking, or life-changing nonfiction book you've ever read?
It can be about anything – science, history, thriller, self-improvement, or something else. Just share the title and a brief reason why it's stuck with you.
Help me find my next great read!
by TheAwareMonk
13 Comments
Sapiens, yoval harari
Enlightenment Now by Pinker
The Righteous Mind by Haidt
Anything by John McWhorter. Reading his “Woke Racism” inspired me to become a teacher.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade
I have a giant list I can pull up for you if you want a wide variety of nonfiction, but if I was going to pick just one…
*The Perfectionists* by Simon Winchester is a great exploration of how precision engineering was invented over the course of the last three centuries and how it enabled us to build the modern world. It’s really cool stuff.
Endurance
*The dawn of everything* by Davids Graeber and Wengrow
The best global history of humanity I’ve ever read.
1. Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz
2. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda
3. Good to Great by James Collins
The corner – David Simon and Ed burns
Stasiland – Anna Funder
The Empathy Instinct – Peter bazalgette
In Cold Blood
Anything and everything by Jon Krakauer
1) Evolutionary Biology – Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. An interesting, easy to follow book comparing similar structures as they change through evolutionary processes.
2) Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat. A Canadian naturalist studies wolves in the wilderness.
3) How to fight presidents by Daniel O’Brien. An interesting collection of facts about past US presidents.
Mummies, Cannibals and Corpses by Richard Sugg.
There’s never just one book, and there are some great ones already recommended. My addition, that will change the way you see everything while taking you on an intellectual quest:
*Chaos: Making a New Science*, by James Gleick
The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han: about how we exploit ourselves in order to be seen, very easy to read.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: great, GREAT book about the problems of big cities, published in 1961 but still relevant today.
What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund: it has lots of illustrations, a little bit phenomenological about the way we imagine things while reading, a visual book on reading from a cover designer.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier: as a gamer, loved to read about how our favorite games came to be.
Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin: a biography about the artist Ai Weiwei, loved it because I love his works.