I’m currently reading The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin and it’s really good. You can tell the guy dedicated his career and life to really thinking about how humans might live in Space, whether that be on the Moon, Mars or in the Asteroid Belt.
I recently read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu and that was also very good, it explained the shortcomings of other theories such as the geographic determinism espoused by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel although I think Why Nations Fail was a bit repetitive at times.
Anything by James Rebanks. His two books are on my mind a lot. It’s about sheepherding in the fells of England.
The first non-fiction book I read for fun is probably still my favorite. I used to hate nonfiction books, but randomly picked up Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident one day. A group of experienced mountain climbers died on a Russian mountain in very mysterious circumstances, leading to all kinds of wild theories from the KGB to the supernatural.
The author essentially becomes a detective, and the book alternates between his experience piecing together the mystery and the journal entries of the group that died. It’s fascinating and was impossible to put down.
It sparked my love of non-fiction and I have since read dozens of others. I left the book a glowing review on goodreads and the author actually liked my review, I fangirled for a bit ngl.
I know the Dyatlov Pass case but that sounds pretty interesting. Does he manage to find out any more about how they died? I understood it was thought to be
spoiler
exposure to the cold, which caused the paradoxical undressing, I can’t remember what caused the cold exposure orignally though as there was like a cut in their tent and stuff too, super creepy haha
Pretty much anything by Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens, Homo-Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Taken as a trilogy of sorts, they manage to do a great job of explaining how humanity got to where we are now, and assuming current trends continue, where we’re headed in the future. All without being super dense and academic.
One that I have fond memories of is Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside, which is a thoroughly enjoyable and comprehensive view of why the British countryside is as we see it now.
On a very different note there is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. A classic and extraordinary dive into logic.
And then there is Eric Berne’s Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, which introduced me (and thousands of others) to Transactional Analysis and certainly called some of my games out, as I expect it does with everyone.
My favorites that I re-read often, actually re-listen on audiobook (shout out libro.fm) are A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster both by David Foster Wallace. I find his writing to be funny, erudite, and addictive. It’s like hearing someone else’s conversation with their brain.
Honorable mention goes to Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb. One of those books that makes you look at the world differently when you finish.
Recently finished The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, a biography of John von Neumann and it was fascinating to hear his impact on so many different fields, e.g. mathematics, the atom bomb, the first computers, game theory, and automata. And all the secondary characters could be subjects of equally fascinating books themselves, e.g. Teller, Oppenheimer, Turing, Gödel, Einstein, Nash, etc.
Yeah, von Neumann was a true genius. I’ll definitely check that book out.
