Sometimes it feels like I never get to read anything new

[conuly]

This is factually untrue - I just finished a new book yesterday - but it does feel that way.

Recommend something to me! Especially nonfiction - I really don't read much of that, so I can promise that I'll never have read whatever you recommend! (Whereas if you recommend anything kidlit or YA there's better than even odds that I've read it.)

Later I'll post up my own list of random recommendations for everybody, but right now I really must dash.

Comments

[redbird]

On the Move: a life by Oliver Sacks.

[conuly]

Thanks :)

Nonfic Recs

[elf]

Suzette Haden Elgin's The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series of books are excellent.

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is available online for free, although not in the most readable format.

James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns are both wonderful US history books.

Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers is about transformative fandom; it's one of the earliest (and still one of the few) academic looks at the fanfic world.

Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing covers many of the common excuse for making sure young women don't decide "author" is the career for them.

John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling expands on the concepts in his article, The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher.

Lewis Hyde's The Gift (which is currently subtitled "reativity and the Artist in the Modern World" but when I first read it, it was "Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property") is a terrific exploration of the cultural side of economic norms.

Paul Williams (not that Paul Williams) Das Energi is a 70's "self-help"-ish philosophy/hippie-ish-thoughts book in the same genre as Be Here Now, whatever that is; there's a handful of segments of this that are still ringing in my head years after I first read them.

Re: Nonfic Recs

[conuly]

Suzette Haden Elgin's The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series of books are excellent.

Did you ever read her LJ? I miss her, still. We lost her entirely too soon.

Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing covers many of the common excuse for making sure young women don't decide "author" is the career for them.

How odd. I would've thought it's a very common career for young women - but then, that might be an artifact of the genres I mostly read.

Re: Nonfic Recs

[siderea]

James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me

Cosigned.

Nonfic Recs

[blueswan]

Ten recs with a bonus tossed in at no extra charge.

On Writing by Stephen King

Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences by Sarah Schulman

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties by Mike Marqusee

On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation by Robert Whitaker

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

Born a Crime: Stories from a South Afican Childhood by Trevor Noah

James Tiptree Jr. The Double life of Alice B Sheldon by Julie Phillips

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
by Lawrence Wright

My Weeds: A Gardener's Botany by Sara Bonnett Stein

Waiting for First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD by Romeo Dallaire

Re: Nonfic Recs

[conuly]

Thanks :)

[oracne]

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris - really interesting! Shows how much American cuisine was influenced by African slaves, and not only in the obvious ways.

Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It by Gina Kolata - one of those Science Mystery-type books.

Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins - one of those cool books that makes cool connections one wouldn't necessarily have identified.

[conuly]

Those sound really great! Does the first one have recipes?

[sabotabby]

I'm going to assume you've read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates but if you haven't, that one. Scathing examination of race in America, written as a letter to his son.

#1 recommendation of the year: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville. Absolutely the best book I've read on the Russian Revolution, which is saying a lot given how much I read about the Russian Revolution.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil. Basically how algorithms destroy our lives. Very accessible even if one knows nothing about the subject.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner: A Story About Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal. Okay, so I read economic books for fun, but this is really good. Spoiler: Adam Smith's mother cooked his dinner and basically provided a bunch of invisible labour that was not factored into his economic theories at all.

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller. Pretty much what it says on the tin. Nostalgic, whimsical, and critical all at once.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber. Why right-wing governments rail against bureaucracy and red tape and yet you still have to arrive at the airport three hours early and get strip searched.

Neoreaction a Basilisk by Phil Sandifer. It's very timely as it's about the alt-right like two years before they were called that. Also takes some interesting turns involving William Blake because that's how Sandifer is.

[peristaltor]

I'm curious about the Weapons book. Does that cover the Big Data drive to predict voter behavior, by any chance?

[peristaltor]

I second Graeber's Debt. If you're into double bookmark books (one for your place in the book, another for your place in the must-at-least skim endnotes), Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is also great.

You like powerful, intelligent women? Can't get better than the lead character of David Bodanis's Passionate Minds: Emilie du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment. She translated Newton's Principia, but added notes herself based on her friendship with Leibniz, who also invented calculus; these notes gave the French an edge in even understanding Newton. Oh, and she would have discovered infrared 80 years earlier, had that petty Voltaire not hogged all the thermometers for his own experiments. Seriously, great book.

Greg Mitchell's The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics is fascinating. As a person, Sinclair (who wrote about 80 books and other stuffs, not just The Jungle) had the popularity of Swartzaneger and the politics of a left-leaning Bernie Sanders. The dirty tricks invented for that campaign remain with us today.

Quite readable, Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea shows how Hitler rose to power not because of hyperinflation, but because of attempts at austerity seven years after the hyperinflation (which was deliberate) ended. Lots of irony, considering Germany's positions today.

Jane Brox's Brilliant is an easy read, but, er illuminating. It covers the history of artificial lighting. Stuff was amazingly expensive, back in the day.

Andrew Nikiforuk's The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the new Servitude is also good. Covers why the ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and others didn't bother inventing mechanized stuff; they had humans!

Speaking of mechanization, William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention is just fun. Steam engine development from the first patents onward.

I'll stop now.

[conuly]

Greg Mitchell's The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics is fascinating. As a person, Sinclair (who wrote about 80 books and other stuffs, not just The Jungle) had the popularity of Swartzaneger and the politics of a left-leaning Bernie Sanders. The dirty tricks invented for that campaign remain with us today.

Oooh!

I'll stop now.

No, no, go on.

[jesse_the_k]

The Body Keeps the Score -- Bessel van der Kolk. How & why trauma lives in our bodies as well as our hearts & minds; explains an effective treatment for PTSD.

Family Properties -- Beryl Satter. How black people were systematically prevented from acquiring the wealth that white people enjoy in owning housing.

Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation -- David Crystal: very funny exploration of how punctuation rules are continually changing.

The Periodic Table -- Primo Levi: collected sketches organized by elements. Many touch on Levi's time in Nazi prison camps.

[conuly]

The Periodic Table -- Primo Levi: collected sketches organized by elements. Many touch on Levi's time in Nazi prison camps.

Sounds like a serious read. I'm slightly wary about Holocaust books - I read entirely too many of them in my youth, and they stuck with me in some very unpredictable ways. How, um, how serious are those segments? (God, that's such a stupid way to ask, but I mean, do they focus on acts and moments unexpected humanity, or on the horror, or is it a mix?)

[the_rck]

Unmentionable by Therese Oneill is a very funny exploration of what Victorian life for women of the middle class was like. It's written as if the author is giving advice to a time traveling woman from our era.

The Law of Superheroes by James Daily and Ryan Davison is an exploration of how current US law might apply to superheroes. Some chapters drag a little, but some are very interesting. The authors have a blog of the same name if you want to see a sample of how they write and what they address. They mostly stick to superheroes that most people are familiar with.

Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? by James Sutherland. The author has two or three books that collect essays trying to figure out tiny puzzles from classic English language literature (mostly British but some from the US). The title essay here is addressing the question of how Mr Darcy's relatives found out that something might, maybe, happen between him and Elizabeth Bennet.

What If? by Randall Munroe. Again, there's blog by the same name. Some of the essays in the collection come from there while others are original to the book. Munroe takes ridiculous questions and follows them to the likely conclusions if they were real. A surprising number of them end in the destruction of our planet. An example question is what would happen if a baseball pitcher could throw at the speed of light. I laugh when I reread these.

The Poison King by Adrienne Mayor is both fascinating and frustrating. It's a biography of a king who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. The frustrating part is that, toward the end, the author launches into pure fiction/wishful thinking by talking about how this man might have lived on after his official death and a few other things that are clearly what she wants to have been true rather than anything she has any evidence for at all.

Shinsengumi: the Shogun's Last Samurai Corps by Romulus Hillsborough is another history book that's fascinating and frustrating. The Shinsengumi were a paramilitary group during the Japanese civil war in the mid-nineteenth century. They supported the Shogun, so they were on the losing side, but they're a big thing in Japanese popular culture (there are a lot of anime/manga series that use some of them as characters). This is, as far as I have been able to discover, the only book about them in English. The problem is that Hillsborough is kind of a fanboy of the other side in the war. That doesn't mean that the Shinsengumi weren't occasionally (or even often) terrible, but it does mean that he hammers on certain points that he thinks are particularly damning to the point that I could almost recite certain bits of repeated phrasing from memory.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by J. McIver Weatherford looks at Genghis Khan's daughters and granddaughters. It skips back and forth in time a bit, and many of the people involved came to really miserable ends (conquest and politics and inheritance will do that). The author's thesis is that none of Genghis Khan's sons were competent to inherit his empire and that his daughters, daughters-in-law, etc. were crucial in holding things together. Weatherford has written at least one other book about the Mongols.

Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz is an attempt to piece together the evidence that we have for how ordinary Egyptians lived in the days of the Pharaohs.

[conuly]

Thanks :)

[skygiants]

Any of Ben MacIntyre's WWII spy history books make for enjoyable nonfiction reading; he's very good at intrigue and absurdity.

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice is a really fascinating biography of civil rights activist Pauli Murray with some Roosevelt and heartwarming friendship stuff woven in.

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon gave me more feelings than any nonfiction book about a Broadway musical has a right to, in my opinion; it's one of the best books I read last year.

[conuly]

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon gave me more feelings than any nonfiction book about a Broadway musical has a right to, in my opinion; it's one of the best books I read last year.

High praise! Putting it in my wishlist right now.

[poisontaster]

I honestly have no idea what your taste is like, so I'm just going to take a swing at it.

The Destiny of the Republic and The River of Doubt, both by Candice Millard. (nonfiction)

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. (nonfiction)

The Rook and Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley (fiction) It's rather like Harry Potter for grownups.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) By Dennis E Taylor (fiction) Space exploration through the POV of a cloned brainship(s).

Borderline by Mishell Baker. (fiction) A mentally ill former movie director gets hired to be a liaison between worlds.

Have you read the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch?

[conuly]

I honestly have no idea what your taste is like, so I'm just going to take a swing at it.

Yeah, that's because my ability to talk about what I like ebbs away. Even a benign statement like "Yes, I watched that big popular show that everybody watched" is sometimes too much for me. Social anxiety? Dunno, but when it's around, it's a big thing. And even when it's not, the habit is hard to break. I've been working really hard at it lately, but it's still baby steps :)

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) By Dennis E Taylor (fiction) Space exploration through the POV of a cloned brainship(s).

That sounds fascinating.

Have you read the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch?

Not yet!

[archangelbeth]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157319.Cause_of_Death

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24942434-scene-of-the-crime

...it is possible I might have some specialized non-fiction tendencies. >_>

(Edit: Or then there's my other hobby, which would lead to things like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2567125/ , which might arguably be NSFW.)

[conuly]

...it is possible I might have some specialized non-fiction tendencies. >_>

Haven't clicked yet, but so long as the covers aren't embarrassing, I'm good. (Wait, that's an advantage of Kindles - no covers!)

[alias_sqbr]

I can't decide so here's my non-fiction tag at goodreads sorted by rating.

[conuly]

Efficient!

[muckefuck]

I basically never read nonfiction anymore. Can't say why.

The most interesting new novel I've read recently is I stared at the night of the city by Kurdish author Bachtyar Ali. I recently started on En finir avec Eddy Belleguele (which almost counts as a memoir) and I'm enjoying it though it's pretty harrowing.

[conuly]

Thanks :)

What's the Kurdish author's novel about, then?

[flexagon]

Late to the party, but my favorite nonfiction in a long time has been The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

I did a post about it when I read it, here:
https://flexagon.dreamwidth.org/612467.html

[conuly]

I think I stalled out halfway through that one.

[siderea]

Top of my nonfiction list is not a book. It's an epic length (42k words) article for Wired, by Neil Stephenson, titled Mother Earth Mother Board: In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan Tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.

It's, I think, the best thing I've ever read.

In other recs:

How grim can you handle?

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

and

A Poison Stronger than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community by Anastasia Shkilnyk

are to cry at. Both very worth reading.

Less hard (mostly): Cities on a Hill: A Brilliant Exploration of Visionary Communities Remaking the American Dream by Frances FitzGerald

Fun: The Tipping Point and perhaps more to your tastes Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Everything by Atul Gawande, e.g. Better. (I've heard Being Mortal is a glum read, haven't read it yet.)

How Children Fail and How Children Learn by John Holt (to be read in that order)

[conuly]

That title is practically a book, but that's high praise!

[yuuo]

Two recommendations for you (three, technically, but the third's a part two to one, so two :p).

The Dhulyn and Parno duology, The Sleeping God and The Soldier King. (Fiction) I've not finished the first- I've got a book that's both together, but I am so far hooked and it's been awhile since I've been hooked on a book like this.

Second, the non-fiction:

The Men With The Pink Triangle, by Heinz Heger. It's an autobiography by a man who was in the concentration camps with the pink triangle back during the Third Reich. EXTREMELY upsetting and graphic, but it's almost necessary to see exactly what happened to those who were men 'like me', and whose only crimes were loving someone, and a grim warning about where we're going now if we don't stop this crazy train while we can.

[conuly]

Thanks :)

Rated 5/5

[fred_mouse]

Looking at my high/five rated books in Goodreads, I have three non-fiction titles: Saltwater in the Ink: Voices from the Australian Seas by Lucy Sussex, which I think was a small press publication and might be hard to get hold of; The Drums Go Bang, an autobiography of Ruth Park and D'arcy Niland that is probably only of interest to people who already know their work; and Get a Grip by Kaz Cooke, which I read long enough ago that I don't actually remember it at all.

Fiction (just limiting to that which I've read/finished recently): Beyond the Labyrinth by Gillian Rubinstein (Australian YA, a bit gloomy); Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones; The Seventh Bride by T Kingfisher (kind of a fairytale); The Legend of the Phoenix Dragon by Brenton McKenna (kids/YA graphic novel set in Broome, Western Australia - almost entirely focused on the non-white populations. This is book 1 of 3, but it appears book 3 has not been published. Ends abruptly); Giant Trouble by Ursula Vernon (Hamster Princess #4; kids, fairy tale inspired); The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (book 1 of 4, YA, interesting take on transposing UK magic ideas to bits of the US); The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson (Cthulu mythos transformative work, ?novella); Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body: A Guerline Scarfe Investigation by Simon Petrie (detective investigates unusual suicide, finds much interesting. In space).

And the stand out book from last year was The watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Most of my favorite nonfiction probably requires being interested in the subject, and I don't know about your specific interests, but here are some good nonfiction books of general interest:

Swimming to Antarctica, by Lynne Cox. Memoir of the author's experiences distance swimming, mostly in super cold water, such as the Bering Strait, and the sea off the coast of Antarctica. She did the obligatory English Channel crossing and held the world record at the age of 15, but her adventures got a lot more unique after that.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. Very tightly written and gripping account of Shackleton's Antarctic expedition that got trapped in the ice and drifted for a couple of years. No fanfare, just every single sentence is about incredibly difficult circumstances and the heroic efforts necessary to overcome them.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline. History of the end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine. A meta-analysis of the research that purports to find significant differences between the male and female brains that lead to differences in behavior, and explodes claim after claim using actual good methodology.

T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez. A history of how the author and some fellow scientists figured out that a giant meteor strike coincided with the end of the dinosaurs.

I saw The Body Keeps the Score recommended upthread. If you're into that sort of thing, I liked Bruce Perry's The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog much better. Warning: lots of child harm.

Somewhat more technical:

Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Explained, by Marie and Elgen Long. A totally fact-based, no-conspiracy-theory (no castaways, no spies, no Japanese prison camps, no turning up later under assumed names) reconstruction of the technical and product management failures that caused Amelia Earhart's plane crash into the ocean.

The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins. Evolutionary biology, and how a lot of specific animals got their features.

The Bronte Myth, by Lucasta Miller. A meta-study of the critical reception, biographical studies, and mythologizing of the Bronte sisters. Totally readable and interesting even if you haven't read or didn't like their works (which I mostly haven't and didn't enjoy the ones I did read, long ago). Emphasis on good methodology. Goes well with the fictional Dark Quartet, by Lynne Reid Banks (whom you may recognize as the author of the Indian in the Cupboard series), which is one of my all-time favorite books.

Let me know if you try any of these!

[conuly]

Oooh, thanks. I'm lately interested in the Late Bronze Age collapse, so a proper book to read will be nice.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

My tastes in nonfiction tend towards the medical, but you do post some medical links, so here are some suggestions:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (medical ethics, issues around treatment of minorities)
And The Band Played On (early days of HIV/AIDS)
Do No Harm (stories of neurosurgery)
Band Aid for a Broken Leg (MSF worker in Africa)
Mapheads (geography lovers)
No More Worlds to Conquer (people who achieved things like Olympic medals, but focusing on what they did next)

Hope some of these appeal :)

[conuly]

Thanks, that's a lot to dive into :)