What non-fiction books has everyone read between classics?
What non-fiction books has everyone read between classics?
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What non-fiction books has everyone read between classics?
Just finished this before I start War and Peace.
I have read this one too.
@Kristy that sounds good!!
@Christopher It was good. The author studied the case for twenty years. She gives a day by day account of the trial.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
@Stacy next on my list for non-fiction if I ever finish War and Peace
@Christopher I feel you! I am trying to get through Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and it’s been slow going. The Russian Lit bender I went on during the holidays is winding down, lol. Good luck with War and Peace! I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation and enjoyed it
I have the Constance Garnett translation. So far so good.
The Complete Letters Of Dylan Thomas. Love his poetry but he was a bit of a train wreck of a human being.
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared. I love a book with a good sense of humor!
Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ and Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’. Both excellent reads.
Also Hope Jahren’s ‘Lab Girl’.
@Donna Loved Lab Girl
Jeanette Walls “The Glass Castle” and Ta Nehisi Coates’ three books “Between the World and Me”, “The Beautiful Struggle”, and “We Were Eight Years in Power”. All amazing reads and relatively quick!
Ditto.
C S Lewis and George MacDonald’s letters, William Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, Lewis and Chesterton’s essays, MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, bios of any of my favourite authors.
@David How were the Lewis and Chesterton essays?
@Cynthia excellent, generally speaking.
Most recently The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, Dogtripping by David Rosenfelt, The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, The Library Book by Susan Orlean, and No Ashes in the Fire by Darnell L Moore.
Reading BECOMING by Michelle
BEST NON-FICTION for BOOK LOVERS. “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean: “…April 29, 1986. Arson at the LA Public Library. Destroyed 400k books & damaged 700k. Part mystery. Part LA-weirdness. Part personal story. Could not put it down!
Added to my TBR list. Thanks.
Dawn of the Belle Epoque and Twilight of the Belle Epoque both by Mary McAuliffe.
If you like these books, I can recommend The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I by Roger Shattuck. It’s a cultural history of the Belle Époque through the lens of four creative figures: the painter Henri Rousseau, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the composer Erik Satie, and the playwright Alfred Jarry.
@Kevin Are you familiar with Dawn of the Belle Epoque and Twilight of the BE? Ordering the book you recommended. Thanks.
Dead Wake – the Sinking of the Lusitania – by Erik Larson
An old book. ‘Rise and fall of third reich’ by William Shirer.
Sapiens
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Me too, @Lorrie. So interesting!
Me three @Lorrie ☺️ I listened to it on audio in the car, I really enjoyed it.
Johnstown by David McCullough.
This year, I’ve read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier by Ismael Beah, and now I’m finishing The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois.
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candace Millard. Wonderfully researched and written
This was a good one!
Many – Anything written by john McPhee is a treat.
The World Is Flat
Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen
The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter
@Laura yikes!!
Some nonfiction works are classics, and I’ve been reading one of them: Plutarch’s Lives. I’ve got the two-volume edition published by The Modern Library of the John Dryden translation because it preserves the structure of the original source work without forcing me to buy all 11 volumes of the Loeb Classics edition. Oxford World’s Classics has a more recent translation, and I usually like their books, but theirs is abridged and they made the peculiar decision to separate the lives out as Greek Lives, Roman Lives, and Hellenistic Lives, which is a bit like recutting Memento so as to eliminate the interlaced timelines. It may retain the bits and pieces, but something is gone of the original intent. Plutarch’s book wasn’t just for reading interesting tidbits about the lives of his subjects, but to offer moral instruction by comparing two related figures and that gets lost in the OWC arrangement.
I’ve also been reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All in conjunction with the plays. Today I read the chapters on Julius Caesar and As You Like It because I intend to read both as my next two Shakespeare plays. I want to read the former ahead of seeing the Donmar Warehouse production, which I taped, and I’ve also got the 1950s movie version on tape. I picked up the latter from a Little Free Library and I want to take it with me to the local park to read now that it’s warming up.
Wow…what exposition
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham. Great narration by the late Edward Herrmann.
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is one of my favorites
@Nathan do you listen to In Our Time? They did a podcast on de Tocqueville which was very interesting.
William Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.
Lots and lots of World War I history last year, as it was the centenary of its end.
The Good Immigrant (UK and US versions)
Richard Dawkins: The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing.
Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman… one of my favorite!
Niederungen ( Nadirs) by Herta Müller
Dark Net
I love anything ‘African’ – and I’ve read so many. The last one was A Game Ranger Remembers by Bruce Bryden. Interesting and entertaining
Quartet—Orchestrating the second American Revolution 1783-1789
“The Unseen hand” ( Conspiracy Theory) Epperson
Anything by Erik Larson or A. Scott Berg, The Boys in the Boat, or Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell.
Anything by Erik Larson, especially ‘The Devil in the White City’
I recently have read “Them” by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse and “Educated” a memoir by Tara Westover. Currently I am reading “Dopesick” by Beth Macy. I would highly recommend it.
I read author biographies, and history, to help me further understand the novels.
The girl with seven names
Read The Sound of Gravel last month, a companion piece for me to Educated, which I read in December.
The Hot Zone
I am currently reading Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather by Tessa Boase. I ordered it thinking it was fiction but it’s every bit as gripping. I had no idea the RSPB was founded to stop the wholesale slaughter of birds for the fashion industry.
“Slacks and Calluses” by Constance Bowman & Clara Marie Allen circa 1944; two teachers work for a summer in a bomber factory building Liberators
Slightly out of Focus by Robert Capa.
Evolutionary Psychiatry
Tbe Genes on tbe Couch
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond. I find his books not only informative and insightful, but they’re great reads, and you find yourself looking at life and history from another perspective.
This year I’ve been reading WWII memoirs. I’ve also read Educated, The Glass Castle.
My husband recommends “All The Gallant Men” by Donald Stratton. He is a native Nebraskan and survived the bombing/sinking of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Still living and going strong at age 94!