Recommended Non-fiction Books

By Juha Haataja

You learn to write from good examples. Even though the web and new web-based forums are increasingly popular mediums for writing, the printed book still has some advantages (no batteries, please!). Here I have listed a few good non-fiction books. I divided the books by topic into a few categories, starting with guides on writing and ending with examples of good non-fiction books.

During the last ten years I have read through a dozen or so guides about writing. Here are some that have been useful (and often also entertaining) to me.

The following two short guides go straight to the point:

• Elements of Style (William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, Roger Angell)
• The Golden Book of Writing (David Lambuth, Budd Schulberg)

The so-called Strunk and White book is the better known of these.

The following two guides on writing are my favorites because of their positive attitude:

• On Writing Well (William Zinsser)
• Writing to Learn (William Zinsser)

There are many books about the craft of writing for (aspiring) writers. The following are found in my bookshelf:

• Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
• Zen in the Art of Writing (Ray Bradbury)
• Writing Down the Bones (Natalie Goldberg, Judith Guest)
• Line by Line (Claire Kehrwald Cook)
• Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Joseph M. Williams)
• Writing from the Inner Self (Elaine Farris Hughes)
• If You Can Talk, You Can Write (Joel Saltzman)

The following books are aimed for the working mathematician (or anyone writing about mathematics):

• Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences (Nicholas J. Higham)
• A Primer of Mathematical Writing: Being a Disquisition on Having Your Ideas Recorded, Typeset, Published, Read & Appreciated (Steven G. Krantz)

If you are serious about writing, you should read a lot of good articles and books. There are classics in each style and area of writing, so go to a library or a bookstore and look up those books.

My own favorites in humor and non-fiction are short pieces, so here are a few collections of those:

• Essays of E. B. White (E. B. White)
• The Thurber Carnival (James Thurber)
• Selected Stories (Ring W. Lardner)
• Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (Joseph Mitchell)
• A Mencken Crestomathy (H. L. Mencken)
• The Most of S. J. Perelman (Sidney Joseph Perelman)
• Without Feathers (Woody Allen)
• Dating Your Mom (Ian Frazier)
• Too Soon to Tell (Calvin Trillin)

Of all these fine writers of short pieces, my favorite is E. B. White. He is also a co-writer of the book Elements of Style.

There are all kinds of subject areas where you can find examples of excellent writing. I have been writing reviews of popular science books for about five years, and the following are some of the best in that lot (about 50 reviewed books). I also had a look at my bookshelf for additional examples. Thus, the following are some of my personal favorites of good writing.

First, here are some good science books for the general audience:

• The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan)
• Life: An Unauthorized Biography (Richard Fortey)
• In the Palaces of Memory (George Johnson)
• Descartes' Error (Antonio R. Damasio)
• The Evolution of Conciousness (Robert Ornstein)
• The Third Chimpanzee (Jared Diamond)
• The Red Queen (Matt Ridley)
• Are We Unique (James S. Trefil)
• The Emotional Brain (Joseph Ledoux)

Secondly, a few books on information technology:

• The Future of Ideas (Lawrence Lessig)
• Secrets & Lies (Bruce Schneier)
• The Social Life of Information (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid)
• Rebel Code (Glyn Moody)
• Open Source (Donal K. Rosenberg)
• Hacker Ethics (Pekka Himanen)
• User Interface Design for Programmers (Joel Spolsky)
• The Design of Everyday Things (Donald A. Norman)
• Things that Make Us Smart (Donald A. Norman)

Lastly, here are some good popular books about the mathematical sciences:

• The Mathematician Sophus Lie (Arild Stubhaug)
• From Here to Infinity (Ian Stewart)
• The Collapse of Chaos (Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart)
• What is Mathematics? (Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins and Ian Stewart)
• The Number Sense (Stanislas Dehaene)
• Innumeracy (John Allen Paulos)
• A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (John Allen Paulos)
• The Book of Numbers (John Horton Conway, Richard K. Guy)
• Mathematical Mysteries: The Beauty and Magic of Numbers (Calvin C. Clawson)
• Life by the Numbers (Keith Devlin)
• Journey through Genius (William Dunham)
• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Hoffman)
• When Things Start to Think (Neil Gershenfeld)
• The Nature of Mathematical Modeling (Neil Gershenfeld)
• Disturbing the Universe (Freeman Dyson)
• Fear of Physics (Lawrence Krauss)
• Advice to a Young Scientist (Peter Brian Medawar)

Disclaimer: The books listed here are a biased sample and do not represent in whole or in part the literature available in libraries or bookstores. So feel free to add your favorites to the list. Have fun!