Recommended Non-fiction Books
By Juha HaatajaYou 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 following two guides on writing are my favorites because of their positive attitude:
- On Writing Well (William Zinsser)
- Writing to Learn (William Zinsser)
- 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)
- 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)
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)
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)
- 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)
- 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)