Lists of books are tricky for all the reasons one might expect: subjectivity, taste, culture, etc. The most common influence I see is time, as in ‘this year’, ‘the 21st century’, ‘the last 10 years’, and so on and so forth.
Today’s option is a list from slate.com and focuses on 50 nonfiction books of the past 25 years. I do read nonfiction when I need a break from heavy ficiton, and I’ve read some of these and have some of them saved on goodreads as ‘to-read’. Comments as follows and will link to reviews / book club questions for these as I write them (nb a ‘BC’ after the author means I read it or was meant to read it as part of a book club).
On the list, have read it:
- Into the Wild by John Krakauer
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers [BC]
- Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- The Night of the Gun by David Carr
- Dreamland by Sam Quinones [BC]
On the list, have not read it:
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot [BC]
- How to Survive A Plague by David France
Other nonfiction not on the list, have read and would recommend:
- Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
- Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
- Junky by William S. Borroughs
- Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
- Zeitoun by Dave Eggers [BC]
- As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee [BC] and Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell [BC]
- Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
- Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher and How to Disappear Completely by Kelsey Osgood
- Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
- Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp and Blackout by Sarah Hepola
- It’s Always Something by Gilda Radner
- Perseopolis by Marjane Satrapi
- Lucky by Alice Sebold
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
- Educated by Tara Westover [BC]