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Nonfiction reading time!
I figured that it would be a good thing to have a thread on nonfiction, since we have so many about fiction here. My favorite nonfiction books are:
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges
Griftopia, Matt Taibbi
The Long Nineteenth Century Series (The Age of Revolution, of Capital, and of Empire) and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, Eric Hobsbawm
Bad Samaritans, Ha-Joon Chang
Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson
Africa's World War and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
No Logo, Naomi Klein
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since WWII, William Blum
Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber
Comments
That is a lovely booklist, I'd second nearly all of those for my own booklist.
Also for me:
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class Owen Jones
Supergods: Our Life In The Age of the Modern Superhero by Grant Morrison is pretty fantastic.
Ghengis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection by John Man
The Corpse Garden by Colin Wilson
I love Ghengis Khan, so I'll have to pick that one up.
I was considering buying this if I ever saw it on the bookshop. Is it really worth my money?
>Das Kapital, Karl Marx
Or as I like to call it, the nonsensical book liberals put on their shelves to look impressive but never actually read.
In any case, here are some ones I've liked.
Under The Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among The Pirates by David Cordingly
Violence by Slavoj Zizek
The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Sound of The Beast: The Complete Head-banging History of Heavy Metal by Ian Christe
Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
^I dug it, though near the end it gets too autobiographical for my tastes.
I forgot Democracy in America by Alexis De Torquelville and Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges.
Or as I like to call it, the nonsensical book liberals put on their shelves to look impressive but never actually read.
Hahaha, it's funny because you haven't read the book either!
Isn't it supposed to be Atlas Shrugged levels of boring to slog through?
^^I tried my damndest to.
^It at least has the justification of being nonfiction but it is similarly impenetrable.
Heh heh, Americans and that their local definition of "liberal".
Me, I tried to compile such a list once, non-fiction works that inspire me. Aristotle, Edmund Burke, that kind of shit. Then I realised I read none of them. But there's a book on the history of Wendish (Polabian) Slavs that I read and like.
^^ It also has the benefit of at least being an honest political criticism from the beginning instead of bullshitting around for half the book making you wade through a laughably idiotic and hackneyed story before you get to the author's delusions.
Make no mistake Das Kapital is by no means as bad as Atlas Shrugged, but I doubt 'By no means as bad as Atlas Shrugged' is ever going to become a pullquote for the book.
If by whatever circumstance I ever write a book (I won't), I'm totally using that pullquote.
but what if it is as bad as atlas shrugged
have you considered that, bee
huh?!?!
If it's not padded to 1000 pages, the pain will only last an instant.
Okay, I'll admit I try to be as neurotically self-effacing as possible about my writing, but I'm pretty sure most of the people on this thread could produce something more enjoyable to read than Atlas Shrugged by wiping their ass and providing a stream-of-consciousness interpretation of the resulting Rorschach smears.
^ If for no other reason, that one.
English majors call such a thing the works of Jane Austen.
Oh man I hate to be predictabo, but:
The Codex Doebringer. It's a pretty fantastic 14th century handbook, obviously written by and for people who held some pretty gnarly secrets -- like the alchemy that goes into making a good blade, or the skilful wielding of a sword. Unfortunately, only the martial arts and alchemy sections are in English, and the rest remains in High Middle German, which is a slog since my modern German is really limited.
All the same, it's a fantastic tactical manual on how to fight. Most historical combat manuals are sequences of annotated illustrations showing techniques, whereas this is more like a series of developed admonitions. Medieval folk didn't write essays in the modern sense, but this is pretty much a series of that general kind of thing. While it bears the name of Doebringer in general understanding, there are actually at least four authors -- but who wrote what is a mystery.
Even more unfortunately, the section on magic spells remains untranslated.
The whole manuscript is like this trip into medieval martial arts, scholasticism and folklore wrapped into one package. There really needs to be a full translation done, and the book released in full.
A couple of non-fiction books I like:
Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 by Simon Reynolds
Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC by Paul Edwards
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
"Das Kapital, Karl Marx"
Tried it. It was too boring, so I read the Communist Manifesto instead.