20 best classic non-fiction books

[gingerhills]

I realise I have read a lot of classic novels but if you asked me to list classic non-fiction books, I wouldn't really know where to start.

What are the non-fic equivalents of Pride & Prejudice, Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird etc? The books you really should read before you die?

Having said I don't know where to start, I would recommend Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. It's surprising accessible in translation and it changed my view on friendship for the better, forever.

The Rise And Fall of The Third Reich

A whopper, so IMO best read on a Kindle.
Sounds v heavy, but although I wouldn’t usually go for this sort of thing at all, and don’t read much NF, I found it riveting.

It was written by an American journalist who’d been based in Berlin during the run up to, and early years of WW2*, and after the war was given access to literally tons of official papers and records the Nazis hadn’t managed to destroy.
Much of it is chilling, and sadly, given very recent news, it has resonances with today.

*His Berlin Diary, written at the time, and published soon afterwards, is also a riveting read.

I love the Songlines and In Patagonia too.

Sara Wheeler has good travel books.

Waterlog is a favourite.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Any of the many collections of Mass Observation diaries.
www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/mass-observation-diaries

@JakeyRolling

Fly Fishing by JR Hartley.

😀😀😀

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson

A few that have been mind-changing for me:

The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
Into the Silence by Wade Davies
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Blake by Peter Ackroyd
The Years of London Baines Johnson by Robert A Caro
The Power Broker by Robert A Caro

Lyndon Baines Johnson

From the shelves I can see from here:

• Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (seminal American history about the final crushing defeat of Native Americans)
• All Out War and Fall Out, Tim Shipman's books about the Brexit campaign and politics afterwards
• Nothing to Envy, an amazing account of what life is like inside North Korea
• Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson's history of the 'surplus women' of the 1920s who should have married the men who died in WW1

And another vote for Invisible Women.

Simone de Beauvoir

On the origin of species

Silent spring

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill by Sonia Purnell
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser (jaw-dropping nuclear weapons mismanagement)
Blitzed Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler

Also agree with Berlin Diaries mentioned above

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Some great suggestions.

Agree Silent Spring, Touching the Void, The Blind Watchmaker, A Vindication of the Rights of Women & Songlines. Fantastic books.

Howard Zinn - A People's History of the USA
Anna Funder - Stasiland
James Gleick - Chaos
Patrick Radden Keefe - Say Nothing

I love a good biography as well, but I have read so many I can't choose.

good list here, some really old:

www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/31/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-of-all-time-the-full-list

Also really memorable from the last twenty years or so:

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer plus his Everest one
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

George Orwell's Essays

My Family and Other Animals, A Room of One’s Own, I am, I am, I am by Maggie O’Farrell, Period Piece by Gwen Raverat, How to be a Heroine Samantha Ellis, Walden Thoreau.

@PermanentTemporary - absolutely the Blake biography.

keep thinking of more, some wonderful books here.
In Cold Blood, Snow Leopard yes yes

Agree I much prefer non-fiction to fiction at moment

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
by Eric Newby

A Winter in Majorca by Georges Sands is quite funny.

She wrote it about the time she was in a relationship with Chopin, when he had TB and was advised to go somewhere warm. Except it was freezing in Majorca, and they couldn't handle how chilled and indifferent Majorcans are.

Another vote here for Akenfield. Incredibly thought provoking and moving. It describes rural life in fictional Suffolk between the wars, at a point when that world was changing for ever.

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is bloody brilliant, and rather topical - about life in the USSR under Khrushchev.

Prospero’s Cell by Lawrence Durrell
Young Romantics: the Shelleys Byron and other tangled Lives by Daisy Hay
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

I know why the caged bird sings - Maya Angelou

@SpiderVersed

Invisible Women by Cariline Criado Perez is the single most important book I've read in decades. I buy copies for everyone!

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Freakanomics (or any of the other fascinating books looking at economics, including Tim Hartford's books)

I found Wilding by Isabelle Tree a fascinating read.

Sapiens mentioned upthread.

The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins

Trans by Helen Joyce is a great analysis of the rise of gender ideology and how it interacts with material reality

Invisible women = yes 100 percent yes

@MinnieJackson

I know why the caged bird sings - Maya Angelou

Yes 😪

Oh wow, what a lot of choices. Though it's interesting there's not such a consensus on what the top classics are. I bet if you asked people about novels they'd all mention Austen, Dickens, Brontes, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck etc.

I've read some of the books suggested - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was wonderful; In Cold Blood is one of the best-written books I've ever read.
I'm going to compile a shortlist. Thank you for all the suggestions.

Invisible Women and The Diary of a Young Girl as per PP.

Plato - Republic

I always learn something from Bill Bryson books.

Educated by Tara Westover really made me think about the determination to succeed.