NOMINATIONS - 1001 Nonfiction Books to Read Before Your Brain Atrophies

We'll see how this goes - both with the name and the nominations.

Please try to keep your nominations down to say, 10 a day*? I'm trying to prevent core dumps of every good nonfiction book you've ever read. Also, do your best to not nominate something that's already been nominated.

Nonfiction includes ANYTHING that could have a Dewey Decimal number - bios, history, memoirs, science, dictionaries, whatever.

PLEASE please please with sugar on top, please include authors!!!

You might also want to consider whether anyone else would have heard of it AND thought it worth reading. I'm going to require at least TWO votes on a book to be included on the final list.

*******

Here are my nominations. They are the books I read in the last few years that got either 9 or 10 stars.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Stiff by Mary Roach
Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks
Marley and Me by John Grogan
The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes
When Food is Love by Geneen Roth
Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
I Thought It Was Just Me by Brene Brown
The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl by Shauna Reid

*I'm not going to be super strict on this. Just try to take it easy.

Anatomy of a Typeface, by Alexander S. Lawson
The Code Book, by Simon Singh
Hackers , by Stephen Levy
No Logo , by Naomi Klein
Nickel and dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Science of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett & Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen (a series of three books)
This is Serbia calling, by Matthew Collin
The dark heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones
Our own devices, by Edward Tenner

Seamanship in the Age of Sail by John Harland
The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism by Jurgen Tautz
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by John Dee
Scotland the Biography by Rosemary Goring
The Discovery of King Arthur by Geoffrey Ashe
Culloden by John Prebble
Arrows Against Steel by Vic Hurley
Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich
The Primal Mind by Jamake Highwater

The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin
From One to Zero: A History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Ah! Visual display... was on my mental list too, but somehow was forgotten as I wrote them down. That one's a real good book :D

Here's my 10
The British Museum Book of Cats by Juliet Clutton-Brock
Reading the Vampire Slayers by Juliet Clutton-Brock
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple
Who Cooked the Last Supper? : The Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles
Gaia The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine by James Lovelock
The Prehistory of the Mind by Steven Mithen
Before the Dawn; Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
The Lords of Avaris by David Rohl
Civilization Before Greece and Rome by H W F Saggs
The Perfect Heresy: the Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars by Stephen O'Shea

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 - Simon Winchester
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream - Hunter S. Thompson
The Professor and the Madman - Simon Winchester
John Adams - David McCullough
Out of the Flames - Lawrence Goldstone

ETA authors - *sorry Morphy!*

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
A Brief History of Time (any edition) Stephen Hawking

Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World Eats by Raymond Sokolov

The Big Book of Conspiracies by Doug Moench

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Hiroshima by John Hersey

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

Zodiac by Robert Graysmith

(ok, you can have authors, but I'm not about to attempt to make author touchstones work)

1. Classic Woodturning Projects with Bonnie Klein by Bonnie Klein
2. Alaska's Inside Passage by Kim Heacox
3. Creative Woodturning by Dale Nish
4. Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand
5. Joinery, Shaping & Milling: Techniques and Strategies for Making Furniture Parts from Fine Woodworking
6. Woodturning: Two Books in One: Projects To Practice and Inspire Techniques by Phil Irons

Hmm, going through the books I own, I really enjoyed reading these:

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine
Looking for China: Reflections on a Silk Road by Judy Schultz
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman
The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and their culture by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
An Ecology of Enchantment by Des Kennedy
Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature by David Quammen
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Mapping Human History: Discovering the past through our genes by Steve Olson
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

In no particular order:

Snoop: What your stuff says about you by Sam Gosling
Predictably Irrational (any edition) by Dan Ariely
The Magic Daughter: A memoir of living with multiple personality disorder by Jane Phillips
Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
Women Don't Ask by Linda Babcock and somebody else
No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Beowulf on the Beach: What to love and what to skip in literature's 50 greatest hits by Jack Murnighan
Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and others
The Guide to Getting it On!

Trees of eastern South Africa: a complete guide by Richard Boon
Life etched in Stone by Colin MacRae
A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson
The story of Earth and Life by Terence McCarthy and Bruce Rubidge
The Riddle and the Knight by Giles Milton
Curry: A tale of Cooks and Conquerors byLizzie Collingham
The British Museum Cookbook by Michelle Berriedale-Johnson

I'm sure there are others ...

These are on my "I'll never give away and will most likely reread" shelves.

Brave Men by Ernie Pyle
Here is Your War by Ernie Pyle
Feelin' Fine by Anne Shannon Monroe
Dear Mad'm by Stella Walthal Patterson
Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
A Shepherd Looks at the 23rd Psalm by W. Phillip Keller
Owen Wister Out West His Journals and Letters by Owen Wister
Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segre
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart
The Last Witch of Langenburg by Thomas Robisheaux (an Early Reviewers alumnus)
The Book Nobody Read by Owen Gingerich
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

ETA: The Devil in the White City's full title includes the word 'magic' and it has a glowing white city on the cover - does that count as glowy magic? Also, two others include nuclear physicists, but they may merely be glowy.

Hard to choose just 10, but here are some that I think have enduring appeal:

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould
Walking With Dinosaurs : a Natural History by Tim Haines
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks
Genome by Matt Ridley
Napoleon's Buttons by Penny Le Couteur
Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell
The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman

edited to fix my typing

Too many essential titles within this one theme:

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Coming Into The Country by John McPhee
Three Against the Wilderness by Eric Collier
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat
John Muir: The Nature Writings by John Muir
Crossing Open Ground by Barry Lopez
Refuge: An Unnatural Act of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams

hmm - I don't read much non-fiction. Trying to recall some that I've liked in the last few years:

A crack at the edge of the world by Siimon Winchester
Front yard gardens : growing more than grass by Liz Primeau
Doctor Who : The Writer's Tale by Russell T. Davies
Grow great grub : organic food from small spaces by Gayla Trail
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (and anything else by him)
All New Square foot gardening by Mel Bartholomew
Wiffle lever to full! by Bob Fischer

If I think of any more I'll come back and add them.

edited to add authors (sorry Morphy)

PLEASE please please with sugar on top, please include authors!!!

A Brief History of Everything and Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber by Ken Wilber

A philosopher shows how to reconcile "faith" and "science" - really! And how to really live your philosophy, come hell or high water.

Please, please, please look at these books and consider voting for them. They are both priceless and unusually awe-inspiring.

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy
1491 by Charles Mann
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
The Canon by Natalie Angier
A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
Beak of the Finch by Johnathan Weiner
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
Strength in What Remains by him
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antartic Expedition by Caroline Alexander
Guns, Germs and Steel, noted above
The Beak of the Finch, noted above
There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

This list is already really bad for my TBR. I've been meaning for *ages* to read more non-thesis non-fiction.

Longitude by Dava Sobel
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester
The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum

Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Alone by Richard Byrd
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Witness by Whittaker Chambers
An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes
The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis
Dominion by Matthew Scully
The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss

Hope there's no repeats on here!

Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwine
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
In Reckless Hands by Victoria F. Nourse
Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer
Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky
The Color Code by Taylor Hartman

Courtesans and Fishcakes: the consuming passions of classical Athens by James Davidson
Antiquities Acquired by C.P. Bracken
A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance by Rubinstein, Frankie
The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America by Sagan, Eli
Field Guide to Snowflakes by Ken Libbrecht

27 J_ipsen.... That Field Guide to Snowflakes looks intriguing. I might have to pester our local library to acquire a copy. Unfortunately we rarely get snow where I live, but I'm sure the photography in the book must be stunning.

A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey
In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall
Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel
Holy Cow - An Indian Adventure by Sarah Macdonald
Impressionist Women by Edward Lucie-Smith

I forgot one!

The Talking Ape, by Robbins Burling

Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Republic by Plato
Confessions by Saint Augustine
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday
Parallel Lives by Plutarch
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Kamasutra (difficult to assign an author to that one)

Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis by Kevin Walsh
It Came From Bob's Basement by Bob Burns and John Michlig
Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong by Mark Cotta Vaz
Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by John Evangelist Walsh
Few and Chosen: Defining Yankee Greatness Across the Eras by Whitey Ford
Did You Grow Up With Me, Too? - The Autobiography of June Foray by June Foray
Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective by Al Santasiere
Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon
Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain by Marty Appel

and three that go together, since we love our "trilogies"...

Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy
More Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy
Extra Nutty!: Even More Letters from a Nut Ted L. Nancy

#7 - Ah yes! Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas A must read for all!!

#16 - How could I forget Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Brilliant and funny stuff from a true genius!

RSPB birds of britain and europe by Rob Hume
Compact, decent pictures, good comparisons between different species/gender/young, clear identification

Food: the definitive guide by John Newton - really everything you need to know about food, where it comes from what it isued in.

the fat duck by Heston Blumenthal - science and food. Awesome.

herb and spice by Jill Norman. A definitive guide, on flavours, preparation and uses.

cyclecraft by John Franklin - bikers bible.

omnivore's dilemma by Michael Pollan - best or many looking at where our food comes from and how it can be improved.

bad science by Ben Goldacre - why you can't trust the media.

ten years under the earth - by Norbert Casteret - how caving got started as a hobby, and just how tough those early explorers really were.

brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable by E Brewer. - because it's fascinating.

Here is New York by E.B. White(the authors visit to New York City. Very good even if you have no desire to be anywhere near New York City)
Autism and Me: Sibling Stories (excellent, really captures kids with Autism and those who interact with them.)
Autism Encyclopedia edited by E. Amanda Boutot, Ph.D. and Matt Tincani, Ph.D. (a good resource esp. for parent with young children with autism)
All things wise and Wonderful and anything by James Herriot
Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (For anyone with children or who have anything to do with children)
The Folkways Omnibus of Children's Games by Iris Vinton
Little Britches by Ralph Moody (reads like fiction but is an autobiography)
Influencer by Kerry Patterson et al

Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich
Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween by David J. Skal
The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works by Charles Van Doren
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee
The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett
The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero by William Kalush
Adolf Hitler by John Toland
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
John Adams by David McCullough
H.P. Lovecraft: A biography by L. Sprague De Camp

The Worst Journey in The World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Race to the End:Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole by Ross D.E. MacPhee
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool
Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj by Marian Fowler
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - seriously? not touchstoning??

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper, and as a non-nonfiction-reader i simply cannot recommend that book enough.

oh yeah i'll second (and touchstone) In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

have you guys noticed how much longer the touchstone list is than the actual posts?

>39 MrAndrew: I have. :)

Under a Green Sky by Peter D. Ward

I have no idea how to make the books linkable here.
(I figured it out!)

Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners by Laura Claridge
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story by Janet Gleeson
Taking the Waters: Spirit, Art, Sensuality by Alev Lytle Croutier
Harem: The World Behind the Veil by Alev Lytle Croutier
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer
A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators
by Susan E. Meyer
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme

You've set yourself a huge task.
Here's a couple more:

The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
If this is a Man, Primo Levi

You've set yourself a huge task.
Here's a couple more:

The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
If this is a Man, Primo Levi

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams by Michael D'Antonio
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes
Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World by Nicholas A. Basbanes
Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture by Nicholas A Basbanes
Editions & Impressions: My Twenty Years on the Book Beat by Nicholas A Basbanes
100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature by Nicholas J. Karolides
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill

The Politics by Aristotle
The Histories by Herodotus
The Second Treatise of Government by John Locke
Emile; Or, On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Double Helix by James Watson
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (we owe so much to HeLa cells, everyone should understand the ethical maelstrom that has led to a lot of our medical advances)
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (because, let's face it, evidence based science rocks - I'd add this twice if we could get away with it)

The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (excellent overview of the last 50 years of African history)
Three Letter Plague by Jonny Steinberg

Dispatches by Michael Herr
Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

Underground by Haruki Murakami

Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals of Captain R. F. Scott by R.F. Scott (Doh!)

The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson

The Digest of Roman Law by Justinian
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
Discourse on Method by René Descartes
The Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
The Last Days of Socrates by Plato
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
A Confession and Other Religious Writings by Leo Tolstoy
Napoleon's Art of War by Napoléon Bonaparte

Oxford English Dictionary complete, none of this shorter, compact versions, the full thing every word.

Encyclopedia britanica complete again - because the facts are true despite wiki's emphemeral nature.

and some more esoteric ones

mushroom miscellany by Patrick Harding - hands off, they're mine

zinn and the Art of road bike Maintenance by Lennard Zinn - because of the name, but ti's also a very useful bike book.

Do you know ANYONE who has read the Oxford Dictionary or Encyclopedia Britannica? LOL.

reading the OED

Yes - Ammon Shea.

(OK I confess I don't know them personally).

We used to read the Encyclopedia as a family when I was small. I don't think it was the britanica. When a suitable topic came up we'd look it up in the big books and then read the associated topics and stuff. Kept us quiet for a while. I doubt that we managed to read all of it though ...

I'm from a weird family, I actually do read encyclopaedias, as do other family members (not husband, though). Dictionaries, now, those are mostly boring but can be interesting as well. Selection of words and articles, and the content of the articles, varies with what year it was printed/edited - very interesting, in itself.

That I haven't nominated any encyclopaedias is because the best ones that I own/have read are Swedish language only. Else I have quite a few I'd like to mention.
That goes for regular non fiction as well - some of the very best are written in Swedish, by Swedish authors.
Which is a shame. You folks are missing some gems.

(I still prefer to consult the printed encyclopaedia for certain topics, if I have it handy. Not least because I at least know what the biases are so know how to screen the text...)

I've always read encyclopedias. Didn't know it was an odd thing to do.

Well, I don't think it's odd to read portions of Encyclopedia Britannica or to read one or two book encyclopedias. But the whole survey is about books to read, which to me would mean to read the ENTIRE Encyclopedia Britannica. It just ain't gonna happen in my case!

#53

Neither did I. We always looked in the dictionary or encyclopedia if we had a question we couldn't answer. Now that I'm an adult I need to get my family a nice encyclopedia set. We don't have one. The running joke in my house now is whenever anyone has a tough question everyone yells out "Google it!" My husband makes fun of me becuse I'm always running to the internet for answers. That's one of the best things to come from the internet. We always have a wealth of information at hand.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
The Grace of Great Things by Robert Grudin
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton
The Americans trilogy by Daniel Boorstin
History of the Idea of Progress by Robert Nisbet
Snobbery: The American Version by Joseph Epstein
Great Heart by James West Davidson
We Die Alone by David Howarth

We have 312 nominations so far, after removing duplicates.

Let's see. The top ten tagged non-fiction that haven't been nominated yet...

These are not nominations, just memory joggers for folks. (And to bump the thread.)

Freakonomics by Levitt, Steven
Fast Food Nation by Schlosser, Eric
Blink by Gladwell, Malcolm
The Tipping Point by Gladwell, Malcolm
God Delusion by Dawkins, Richard
Into the Wild by Krakauer, Jon
On Writing by King, Stephen
A Walk in the Woods by Bryson, Bill
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Nafisi, Azar
Night by Wiesel, Elie

A Secret Country by John Pilger
The Last of the Nomads by W.J. Peasley (sorry, doesn't touchstone correctly)

The Sixth Extinction by Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin

Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo by Birute M.F. Galdikas
In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall
Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 20 by Steve Coll

Letters Home by Sylvia Plath

Notes: On the making of Apolcalypse Now by Eleanor Coppola

Is that a gun in your pocket?: The truth about female power in Hollywood by Rachel Abramowitz

Sixpence house by Paul Collins

Sex, sin and blasphemy: A guide to America's Censorship wars by Marjorie Heins

Everything bad is good for you. by Steve Johnson

The Wizard of OZ (BFI film classics) by Salman Rushdie

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton
Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy
Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld by Herbert Asbury
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer
Coercion: Why We Listen to what "They" Say by Douglas Rushkoff
Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Robert L. Park
Step Right Up!: I'm Gonna Scare the Pants off America by William Castle

A Guide to Skywatching by David H. Levy
Railway Man by Eric Lomax
Decoupage: An Illustrated Guide by Nerida Singleton
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Snakes and Ladders by Dirk Bogarde

Oh! So many new books to add to the TBR, and others already on the TBR to be given a boost upward. Lord, there are so many books I simply MUST read, I can never die. :)

I agree with so many of the above lists, but by my own rule I'm only listing the best of the non-fiction books I've actually read that aren't already included on other lists above:

Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston's Women's Health Book Collective

(Walden Pond by Thoreau (I admit I didn’t finish it (yet); otherwise, it would be on the list. I also didn’t read Silent Spring or Future Shock, but I think those were/are pretty important books too.)

Edited to clean up the mess I made before actually reading the first past.

When is actual voting going to begin?

I want to give it at least a week, maybe ten days. So, how about July 19th?

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
Conversations of Socrates by Xenophon
Democracy and Education by John Dewey
The Essays by Francis Bacon
An Introduction to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead
Relativity by Albert Einstein
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano
The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts

Remembered one more - Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass.

if it's a list of 1001 books and fewer than 1001 are nominated, do we just put them all in? This is gonna be so bad for my TBR list...

#62 - LOL at Brave New World making it into the non-fiction lists. Even in the UK with the highest amount of surveillance per person in the world (well in some areas of London maybe), life isn't quite that bad. Yet.

>69 reading_fox: Don't worry. I'm checking every book for a Dewey number.

>68 reconditereader: No, we'll still have voting. The SF list is 111. Although the requirements will be lower.

#70 But I thought Fiction has a Dewey number too?

Well, yes (mostly 813), but I'm also classifying each book (Animals, Nature, etc.) so I can catch it that way, too.

Speaking of Dewey, can someone help me classify Feelin' Fine by Monroe, Anne Shannon.

http://www.librarything.com/work/4813646

LC number is Lh 2415m1 (I think.)

926.3

Awesome, thanks.

I'm going through and checking the titles, authors and adding number of members, a "type" (autobiography, nature, religion, history, etc.), Dewey and original publication year. I'm about a third through. *whew*

The last batch I'll suggest:

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Ordinary Courage by Joseph Plumb Martin
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
The Common Law by Oliver Wendel Holmes, Sr.
A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy
The Dhammapada
The Bible
The Qur'an

#69 reading_fox ~ Well, drrr, what was I thinking? You're right. I'm withdrawing Brave New World, which is dystopian science fiction, not nonfiction.

*slouches off grumbling at own folly*

I tried to recommend books people will actually read, not books which are the hallmark of western civilization. I doubt someone is going to come home from work and open up a volume of Aristotle. Here's a few more:

Modern Times by Paul Johnson
History of the American People by Paul Johnson
My Dog Skip by Willie Morris
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Friendship by Joseph Epstein
Donnie Brasco by Joe Pistone

You'd be wrong.

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing
For Your Own Good by Alice Miller
Loss by John Bowlby
Separation by John Bowlby
Cybergrace by Jennifer Cobb
The Good Book by Peter Gomes
Asylums by Erving Goffman

78: I doubt someone is going to come home from work and open up a volume of Aristotle.

While we're at it, why don't we remove War and Peace from the 1001 Fiction Books to Read?

In a different direction, in a few months' time another one we could look at is 101 Movies Made from Books that are Actually Worth Watching.

I can add a few more:
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar
Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence by Laura Claridge
Blue: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau
Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn by Hannah Holmes

A few more:

Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto by Anneli Rufus
Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them by Marjorie Taylor
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

#82 Are there so many?

#82 and 85: no matter how many there may be, I would definitely be interested in the list. (does that mean I confess to being only a sometime reader?)

I'm willing to do it next. Realize it will be near the end of the year probably before I'm ready to do a new survey.

This one's turning into a real project isn't it?

I meant no offense to readers or to Aristotle. Just an observation.

Morphy, don't know about classification, but Feelin' Fine is sort of the verbal memoirs of an old time pioneer from Oregon written down by Anne Shannon Monroe. Come to think of it, having known some old time pioneers, I can't guarantee that it is total nonfiction. ;) But it does make for a great read and an insight into the times and peoples of that area.

Here are some more I've enjoyed reading:
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
The Prince of Pleasure by J.B. Priestley
The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
The Log of a Cowboy by Andy Adams
Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck
Their Finest Hour by Winston Churchill

Be sure if you are adding books to make a new post. DO NOT go back and edit a previous post as I am only reviewing each post once.

87 - No problem on my part. Mine is just the suggestion, even if it doesn't eventuate, I'm happy.

I don't remember seeing The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn mentioned before and, while I didn't read the entire thing, I think it might belong on this list.

I used to read a lot of Tom Wolfe and fondly remember Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which I read back in my own radical days along with a number of others by him.

Also, not sure if it is acceptable for such a list, but I couldn't have survived my early married days without Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker. I still have a copy.

Speaking of cookbooks, Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé and Recipes for a Small Planet by Ellen Buchwald Ewald are also still on my kitchen shelf.

I also didn't read the entire work, but I mean to someday so will suggest The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton as a possibility.

I was looking for the name of a book I read, oh, twenty, 25 years back and came across another I read a bit more recently: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt.

And here's the one I was looking for: Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which is about one of my favorite historical periods, though I don't expect it would charm everyone.

Oh, here's another I don't think I saw nominated but which really made an impact on me when I read it many years ago: Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller. In fact, I used it as reference for a paper I wrote for my Psychology class.

Mae West: It Ain't No Sin by Simon Louvish
Stanwyck by Axel Madsen
Tall, Dark and Gruesome by Christopher Lee
Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" by Lee Server
Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning-Hollywood's Master of the Macabre by David J. Skal
American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema by Jonathan Rigby
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir by Foster Hirsh
Movies and Money by David Puttnam
Art: A New History by Paul Johnson
Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution by Edmund Blair Bolles
The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall
Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
Brunelleschi's Dome : How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David L. Lewis

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History by John M. Barry
Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio by Jeffrey Kluger
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
Quinine: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure That Changed the World by Fiammetta Rocco
Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle by Richard Holmes
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today by Max Boot
The Face of Battle by John Keegan
The Mask of Command by John Keegan
The Essential Canon of Classical Music by David Dubal
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

Just an FYI - there is no way I'll have the list ready for the survey by Monday. Maybe the following Monday.

I am awed by the work you have set for yourself, Morphy, take all the time you need.

The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch
The Creation of the Media by Paul Starr
Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded by Thomas Sowell
Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet by Julie L. Horan (Hey, not all history has to be serious)

Battle of wits: The complete story of codebreaking in world war II by Stephen Budiansky
and one of the books Morphy mentioned as possibly left out - Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser.

I'm going to shuffle in a nominate a few:
The Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells by A. Wainwright are some of my favourite books in the whole world (series of 7).
Feet in the Clouds by Richard Askwith
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman are a classic.
Noone's actually nominated Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Outermost House by Henry Beston
My War Gone By, I Miss it so by Anthony Loyd
Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull

I almost forgot.

Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest by Stephen E. Ambrose
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan

I had the pleasure and honor of meeting some of the gentlemen from E Company in Kuwait. They braved the insufferable desert heat to come visit the troops.

The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge by Calvin Coolidge
Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy
The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy
Understanding Anti-Americanism by Paul Hollander
If Aristotle Ran General Motors by Tom Morris
A Humane Economy by Wilhelm Ropke
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Life Sentences by Joseph Epstein
The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John Mcphee
Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins

Where is the list of 1001 Fantasy books?

1001Fantasy
http://www.librarything.com/profile/1001Fantasy

111ScienceFiction
http://www.librarything.com/profile/111ScienceFiction

The Glory and the Dream by Wm. Manchester
Greatest Game Ever Played by Mark Frost
The Civil War: a narrative by Shelby Foote
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Designing Disney by John Hench
The Lord of the Rings: a reader's companion by Wayne G. Hammond
Walt Disney Imagineering by the Imagineers
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel
The Art of Disneyland by Jeff Kurtti

The White Cascade by Gary Krist
Curse of the Narrows by Laura MacDonald
Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Thomas Myers
Firestorm at Peshtigo by Denise Gess
Tracking Dinosaurs by Martin Lockley
Snowstruck: in the Grip of Avalanches by Jill Fredston
The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren
Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail by Stephen Bown
Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery by Richard Selzer
Threads from the Web of Life by Stephen Daubert

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson
The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson
Truman by David McCullough
Miracle at Midway by Gordon W. Prange
All the President's Men by Bob Woodward
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
The Disneyland Encyclopedia by Chris Stodder
Next Man Up by John Feinstein
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
A World at Arms by Gerhard Weinberg
In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times by Gale Christianson
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattiari
Ancient History: Evidence and Models by M. I. Finley
The Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom by Andrew D. White

The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

I'm getting close to being done with the background work, so let's wrap the nominations in the next couple of days. Please try to keep in mind that this list is more of "I read this and think other people will LIKE it" rather than "anyone who is well-read SHOULD read this."

the right way to make jams by Cyril Grange which I came across at my parents. Old in style but tells you everything you need to know in an easily understandable manner.

darkworld by Martyn Farr. I found it fascinating, but it is somewhat of a niche audience.

The Phone Book by M.Bell.

Bite me. :)

Mosby's Dental Drug Reference by Mosby

DSM IV ;) I can imagine this getting a lot of use here...

Tough to find good stuff that hasn't been listed already, but here it goes:

Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby
The forest for the trees by Betsy Lerner
At the water's edge by LT author Carl Zimmer
The trouble with science by Robin Dunbar
The way of Zen by Alan Watts
Pale blue dot by Carl Sagan
Chaos by James Gleick
Power, sex, suicide by Nick Lane
The first American by C. W. Ceram
The ancestor's tale by Richard Dawkins

"I read this and think other people will LIKE it" rather than "anyone who is well-read SHOULD read this."

I'm recommending based on the second of these not the first - I can't make a decision about what you'll like, we're independent readers, that's the decision for you all to make. I can simply tell you which non-fiction books I think you should read based on whether they have something significant to say. I would then hope that everyone would make their own decisions about what they like.

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

I don't want to get into a discussion here about the different reasons people read. All I can do is say my purpose of creating *this* list is to find books for people to enjoy - whatever they consider that enjoyment to be - and not a list of books that "must be read to be considered well read."

Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is

This is a book I recommend to everyone.

I appreciate your emphasis on books people might "enjoy" if they read them. I have had my fill of books I am "supposed" to read and which, when I try them, are so dense and specialized that it would be a college class all by itself to read them.

Art Across Time by Laurie Schneider Adams. Volumes one and two, though I only have volume two, but I'm hoping to receive volume one soon from Thriftbooks. Volume two I picked up when the Logos ship visited my country, and I got it for a steal of a price. It is one of the best buys I ever made, as the book is a thoroughly enjoyable, information packed, beautifully illustrated examination of Art from the Renaissance up to the present. If you're interested in the history of Art but you're a layman like myself, then you will really enjoy this book.

I don't want to get into a discussion here about the different reasons people read. All I can do is say my purpose of creating *this* list is to find books for people to enjoy - whatever they consider that enjoyment to be - and not a list of books that "must be read to be considered well read."

The fact that you believe one (intellectual fulfillment) negates the other (enjoyment) speaks volumes about the reading habits of the average person.

I love non-fiction. I agree with many of the above, but here are some more that (I think) no one has mentioned yet

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
The Translator by Daoud Hari
Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie
Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
What is the What by Dave Eggers
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
The Big Burn by Timothy Egan
A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

>126 Phocion: I said I'm not going to argue it here. It's for nominations.

P.S. I'm closing down nominations Sunday evening.

What is the What by Dave Eggers is actually Fiction.

The five love languages by Gary Chapman is an excellent book.

>>129 cosmicdolphin:--Yup,technically, you're right. To me, it straddles the two genres. It's been discussed many times on various groups here as to which catagory it belongs. Maybe we need another list of 'almost' nonfiction?

The Dangerous River by R.M. Patterson - his account of trips to the Nahanni River in 1928 and 1929 - one of the best books about canoeing I've ever read, plus a fascinating account of travel in the north of north america in the days before roads.

I Married the Klondike by Laura Berton

Anything by Gerald Durrell - My Family and Other Animals
is a favourite

I also loved West with the Night by Beryl Markham and Wonderful Life mentioned above - or anything else by Stephen Jay Gould.

These are a few of my favourites that fit the "you have to read this" criteria

Alan Lightman and Oliver Sacks must be represented. To that end:

A Sense of the Mysterious by Alan Lightman
The Discoveries by Alan Lightman
An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

And just for some nonfiction variety:

The Female Thing by Laura Kipnis
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

well so far as I can tell, these books haven't been mentioned yet (my apologies if they have)

T-Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez
Band of Brothers Stephen Ambrose
The Boy Scout Handbook by William Hillcourt
Shelters Shacks and Shanties by D.C. Beard
Flags of our Fathers by James Bradley
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
Across the Wide Missouri by Bernard DeVoto
The Way Things Work by David Macaulay
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen J. Gould

and one more
A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren

Another one:

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Thought provoking account of a Hmong family navigating the medical system in America.

*facepalm* Oliver Sacks, of course! I thoroughly enjoyed reading his accounts.

Just thought of another book I enjoyed:

Volcano cowboys by Dick Thompson

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Collapse by Jared Diamond
Coming into the Country by John McPhee
Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
Wonderful Life by Stephen J. Gould
Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson
The Practice of Management by Peter F. Drucker
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
A History of Britain by Simon Schama
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Anything can Happen, by George Papashvily

I can't guarantee that he didn't make some of the tales in it up, but it is his memoirs of coming to America from Georgia and it made me hysterical to read it. One of my husband's and my favorite read aloud books, providing you can stop laughing long enough to read it.

Some great ones here already but I'm trying not to duplicate:

Columbine - Dave Cullen
Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
The Brontes: A Life in Letters - Juliet Barker
The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer
De Profundis - Oscar Wilde
The Common Reader - Virginia Woolf
The Letters of Heloise and Abelard - Peter Abelard & Heloise d'Argenteuil
Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Primo Levi:the Tragedy of an Optimist - Myriam Anissimov

ETA - Touchstones having a hiccup. The Common Reader is, of course, by Virginia Woolf.

Can you put the authors in please?

Sorry - missed your request in #1. Consider it done.

Thanks! It's just one less step for me.

Someone listed A River Runs Through It. I thought that was a novel (or novella).

Agatha Christie - An Autobiography, by Agatha Christie

Loved this one, but my copy has gone wandering. :(

The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination by Neil Fiore

*sticks fingers in her ears*

la la la la la, I can't hear you, la la la la la

*snerk*

#148 LOL!

Dang, just found this thread. And would certainly have added The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer. But I understand that nominations are closed . . .

Rules were made to be broken. Or at least stretched.

Breaking the Rules of Watercolor by Burt Silverman

Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 by Stephen Bury

Rebel Cook: Breaking the Rules for Brilliant Food by Simon Rimmer

Alternative Scriptwriting: Writing Beyond the Rules by Ken Dancyger

Breaking the Rules: Last-Ditch Tactics for Landing the Man of Your Dreams by Laura Banks

Breaking the Rules by Barbara Taylor Bradford (i know it's not non-fiction, but i claim immunity under >#154)

or at least...

Stretching For Dummies by LaReine Chabut

The Strange Adventures of Mr. Andrew by John Buchan

LOL!