There are only two purposes to most ‘Must Read’ book lists to make people either feel smug or inadequate – dependent on how many you have read (or have pretended to read). At the weekend my twitter feed was full of re-tweets of the Guardian’s ‘The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction List’. I figured that I’d fair badly but this was a really mean list, and the comments seem to back it up. Samuel Pepys, Gertrude Stein, Herodotus, Samuel Johnson, Freud, Plato, Sun Tzu, and Stephen Hawking are not for the lay reader. Hell I’ve just finish a Classics degree and I’ve only read extracts of Herodotus (and as many of the commentators pointed out it was generous of the list builders to include him since he mixes a fair amount of fiction in his historiography) and Alex got through ‘A Brief History of Time’ because he majored in Physics. Out of 100 books only three books from the last decade. It’s not really an accessible or even a gateway list to promote reading more non-fiction which makes me sad. My thoughts on how to lift the list:
- Skip Samuel Pepys actual diary and just follow him on twitter instead or read Claire Tomalin’s biography
- Military history is sort of scattered throughout the different sections but I’d include some Stephen Ambrose (particularly D-Day and Band of Brothers) and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down
- Freakonomics is a glaring omission
- For memoirs I’d like to see Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories as they are laugh out loud funny, and philosophy could do with some pop philosophers like Alain de Botton
- Why struggle to read ‘The Art of War’ and ‘The Prince’ when you can watch four seasons of The Wire to see their lessons in action
- The science section needs some serious lightening. I’m a big fan of John Gribbin as his books were accessible enough to read in high school (though I was quite a nerdy), Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson are also good
- Where the heck is Bill Bryson his travel books are hilarious and Paul Theroux‘s ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’, and ‘The Happy Isles of Oceania’ are classics in the grumpy traveler field
And what about the recent trend of histories of cities or objects? I think the Guardian Book dept. could have done better.
