Suffering a bit of sleeplessness here, so I'm looking for a bit of new reading material.
Anyone care to recommend some good non-fiction? Preferably about the deeper subjects in life, some good philosophy probably wouldn't go amiss. I'm not a massive literature kinda guy, but I've certainly enjoyed famous books like A Brief History Of Time, The God Delusion, A Short History Of Nearly Everything etc... I suppose I'm just looking for similar titles in that style.
I'm more concerned with it being a good read, I guess, than too heavily factual. I have a collection of Orwell's essays that I try and get into every now and again but I find his writing a little too impenetrable sometimes. I like Dawkin's sarcastic and kind of cuntish tone, so that'd be a plus.
In return, have some cookies? Many thanks in advance chaps.
I'm sorry, your question is just a bit too vague. There are too many books to be able to give you recomendations based on "sarcastic like Dawkin but factual like Orwell"
What sort of subjects are you interested in?
Well, that's kind of why I'm asking, what I'm after is rather vague. If I knew the narrower range of subjects I'd enjoy, I'd just look something up myself on Amazon. If I knew where to start I wouldn't be here.
Basically I just want some easily digestible science or philosophy in the style of the books I mentioned. It doesn't particularly matter to me what it's about as long as it's interesting. I just hoped somebody might have read something similar that they could recommend :/
>>4768 There's a good range of "Very short introdutions to" books on amazon that deal with a wide range of subjects, you might enjoy those and they'd give you some idea of what you might be interested in finding information on.
If you appreciate Dawkins cuntish tone, you'd like Nassim Taleb. I thought the Black Swan to be great, I honestly found myself laughing out loud several times. It is essentially a philosophical treatise on the limitations of human knowledge. Its not dull and dry though, you feel the full force of Taleb's idiosyncratic personality.
Two more measured and reasonable people I like are Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. They both write well and in an approachable manner. Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett covers the implications of evolutionary theory and Pinker's The Blank Slate covers similar ground, covering the debate around human nature.
I am also reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's Empires of All Maladies a social/ scientific history of cancer (it's aimed at a general audience). I can strongly reccomend it.
It's probably too late to be of use, but Bill Bryson (who wrote A Short History) is a fantastic travel writer, if you're into that, and has a book called At Home which is an interesting historical read.
>>4863 If you're going to start with Bryson, for pleasure I'd recommend some of his earlier stuff, especially Notes From A Small Island (he is possibly the only American to ever get close to understanding the British mentality, though sometimes his knowledge of this fact can come across as a bit arrogant), Down Under and A Walk In The Woods, and for something fleetingly more educational then Mother Tongue is interesting to those of us who get a bit of a hardon for entry-level etymology/linguistics, and A Brief History of Nearly Everything is worth getting out the library although I can't remember much about it.
Watson's 'A Terrible Beauty' is an intellectual history of the twentieth century. It's excellent and absorbing, with practically every major innovation in every field getting a mention.
>>4766 If Orwell's essays are 'too impenetrable' then you obviously have shit for brains m8. May I suggest something by Niall Fergusson or Christopher Hitchens?