#38: 50 Must Read Nonfiction Books

Our 38^th prompt comes from Caudex. They ask:

What are some magnificent nonfiction, non-management, non-self-help books you’d recommend?

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Caudex,

It’s as if you know how much I love reading and recommending books to people. This is a pretty solid reading list that should last you a year or two depending on your reading pace. The books are listed in no particular order, and span a wide range of topics, from big data, behavioural science, physics, decolonization, humour, feminism, economics, autobiographies, philosophy and identity.

1. Weapons of Math Destruction – Cathy O’Neil
2. Sex at Dawn – Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha
3. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches – Audre Lorde
4. Why Nations Fail – Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson
5. Unbowed – Wangari Maathai
6. Capital in the Twenty First Century – Thomas Piketty [really long, a bit boring]
7. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – Jenny Lawson
8. The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
9. Men Explain Things To Me – Rebecca Solnit
10. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
11. Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics – bell hooks
12. Death by Black Hole – Neil deGrasse Tyson
13. What Moves at the Margin – Toni Morrison
14. The Dilbert Principle – Scott Adams
15. Hyperbole and a Half – Allie Brosh
16. I Write What I Like – Steve Biko
17. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood – Marjane Satrapi
18. Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle – Thomas Sankara
19. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman – Lindy West
20. Freakonomics – Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner
21. This Bridge Called My Back – Cherrie Moraga& Gloria Anzaldua
22. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
23. The Confidence Game – Maria Konnikova
24. Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
25. How To Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran
26. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
27. Asking For It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do About It – Kate Harding
28. Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely
29. Ain’t I A Woman? – bell hooks
30. Development as Freedom – Amartya Sen
31. Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? – Katrin Marcal
32. The Muqaddimah – Ibn Khaldun
33. On Identity – Amin Maalouf
34. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
35. Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan
36. Sex From Scratch – Sarah Mirk
37. The Big Short – Michael Lewis [I’d say read all his books]
38. We Are Never Meeting In Real Life – Samantha Irby
39. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
40. Bossypants – Tina Fey
41. Man’s Search For Meaning – Victor Frankl
42. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error – Kathryn Schulz
43. When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
44. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History – Elizabeth Kolbert
45. Hyperspace – Michio Kaku
46. Delusions of Gender – Cordelia Fine
47. The Education of a British-Protected Child – Chinua Achebe
48. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate – Naomi Klein
49. Conversations with Myself – Nelson Mandela
50. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

Of course there are books that should be here but aren’t because I have yet to read them or because I didn’t want to make a very long list – please recommend them in the comments! 🙂

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This post is part of a daily writing experiment that I’m running for a year. I’d love it if you took part! ?