This is a recommended reading list of non-fiction books and other pieces of factual writing on topics such as history and philosophy.
| Genre | Title | Author | Read? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Art | The Shock of the New | Robert Hughes | x |
| Art | The Story of Art | Ernst Gombrich | x |
| Art | Ways of Seeing | John Berger | x |
| Biography | Eminent Victorians | Lytton Strachey | x |
| Biography | Goodbye to All That | Robert Graves | x |
| Biography | Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects | Giorgio Vasari | x |
| Biography | The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas | Gertrude Stein | x |
| Biography | The Diaries of Samuel Pepys | Samuel Pepys | x |
| Biography | The Life of Samuel Johnson | James Boswell | x |
| Culture | Mythologies | Roland Barthes | x |
| Culture | Notes on Camp | Susan Sontag | x |
| Culture | Orientalism | Edward Said | x |
| Culture | The Hero With A Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell | x |
| Culture | Writings from Japan: An Anthology | Lafcadio Hearn | x |
| Environment | Silent Spring | Rachel Carson | x |
| Environment | The Revenge of Gaia | James Lovelock | x |
| History | Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee | Dee Brown | x |
| History | Eichmann in Jerusalem | Hannah Arendt | x |
| History | Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression | Studs Terkel | x |
| History | History of the Russian Revolution | Leon Trotsky | x |
| History | Postwar | Tony Judt | x |
| History | Shah of Shahs | Ryszard Kapus'cin'ski | x |
| History | The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 | Eric Hobsbawm | x |
| History | The Histories | Herodotus | x |
| History | The History of England | Thomas Babington Macaulay | x |
| History | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | x |
| History | The Making of the English Working Class | EP Thompson | x |
| History | The Second World War | John Keegan | x |
| History | We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes | Philip Gourevitch | x |
| Journalism | Dispatches | Michael Herr | x |
| Journalism | The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test | Tom Wolfe | x |
| Journalism | The Journalist and the Murderer | Janet Malcolm | x |
| Literature | An Image of Africa | Chinua Achebe | x |
| Literature | How To Read A Book | Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Lincoln Van Doren | x |
| Literature | The Lives of the Poets | Samuel Johnson | x |
| Literature | The Uses of Enchantment | Bruno Bettelheim | x |
| Mathematics | Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Douglas Hofstadter | x |
| Memoir | Bad Blood | Lorna Sage | x |
| Memoir | Confessions | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | x |
| Memoir | De Profundis | Oscar Wilde | x |
| Memoir | Homage to Catalonia | George Orwell | x |
| Memoir | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | Frederick Douglass | x |
| Memoir | Personal Memoirs | Ulysses S. Grant | x |
| Memoir | Speak, Memory | Vladimir Nabokov | x |
| Memoir | The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | x |
| Memoir | The Man Died | Wole Soyinka | x |
| Memoir | The Periodic Table | Primo Levi | x |
| Memoir | The Seven Pillars of Wisdom | TE Lawrence | x |
| Memoir | The Story of My Experiments with Truth | Mahatma Gandhi | x |
| Mind | As A Man Thinketh | James Allen | x |
| Mind | How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed | Ray Kurzweil | x |
| Mind | The Art Of Memory | Frances A Yates | x |
| Mind | The Interpretation of Dreams | Sigmund Freud | x |
| Music | The Romantic Generation | Charles Rosen | x |
| Philosophy | Critique of Pure Reason | Immanuel Kant | x |
| Philosophy | De Oratore | Cicero | x |
| Philosophy | Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion | David Hume | x |
| Philosophy | Essays | Michel de Montaigne | x |
| Philosophy | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | x |
| Philosophy | Meditations on First Philosophy | René Descartes | x |
| Philosophy | On Liberty | John Stuart Mill | x |
| Philosophy | Phenomenology of Mind | GWF Hegel | x |
| Philosophy | The Anatomy of Melancholy | Robert Burton | x |
| Philosophy | The Story of Philosophy | Will Durant | x |
| Philosophy | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | Thomas Kuhn | x |
| Philosophy | The Symposium | Plato | x |
| Philosophy | Thus Spake Zarathustra | Friedrich Nietzsche | x |
| Philosophy | Walden | HD Thoreau | x |
| Politics | A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Mary Wollstonecraft | x |
| Politics | Here Comes Everybody | Clay Shirky | x |
| Politics | Leviathan | Thomas Hobbes | x |
| Politics | Manufacturing Consent | Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman | x |
| Politics | The Art of War | Sun Tzu | x |
| Politics | The Communist Manifesto | Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels | x |
| Politics | The Female Eunuch | Germaine Greer | x |
| Politics | The Medium is the Massage | Marshall McLuhan | x |
| Politics | The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | x |
| Politics | The Rights of Man | Thomas Paine | x |
| Politics | The Second Sex | Simone de Beauvoir | x |
| Politics | The Souls of Black Folk | WEB DuBois | x |
| Politics | The Wretched of the Earth | Franz Fanon | x |
| Religion | The God Delusion | Richard Dawkins | ✔ |
| Religion | The Golden Bough | James George Frazer | x |
| Religion | The Varieties of Religious Experience | William James | x |
| Science | A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | x |
| Science | A Short History of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson | ✔ |
| Science | On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | x |
| Science | The Character of Physical Law | Richard Feynmann | x |
| Science | The Double Helix | James Watson | x |
| Science | The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins | x |
| Society | A Room of One's Own | Virginia Woolf | x |
| Society | Discipline and Punish | Michel Foucault | x |
| Society | Economy and Society | Max Weber | x |
| Society | In Cold Blood | Truman Capote | x |
| Society | Let Us Now Praise Famous Men | James Agee and Walker Evans | x |
| Society | Letters Concerning the English Nation | Voltaire | x |
| Society | News of a Kidnapping | Gabriel García Márquez | x |
| Society | Praise of Folly | Erasmus | x |
| Society | Slouching Towards Bethlehem | Joan Didion | x |
| Society | Suicide | Émile Durkheim | x |
| Society | The Book of the City of Ladies | Christine de Pisan | x |
| Society | The Feminine Mystique | Betty Friedan | x |
| Society | The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | x |
| Society | The Republic | Plato | ✔ |
| Society | The Wealth of Nations | Adam Smith | x |
| Travel | A Time of Gifts | Patrick Leigh Fermor | x |
| Travel | Black Lamb and Grey Falcon | Rebecca West | x |
| Travel | China Along the Yellow River | Cao Jinqing | x |
| Travel | Danube | Claudio Magris | x |
| Travel | Innocents Abroad | Mark Twain | x |
| Travel | Letters to a Young Novelist | Mario Vargas Llosa | x |
| Travel | Passage to Juneau | Jonathan Raban | x |
| Travel | The Rings of Saturn | WG Sebald | x |
| Travel | The Travels of Ibn Battuta | Ibn Battuta | x |
| Travel | Venice | Jan Morris | x |