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Favourite non-fiction books of the last couple of years?
The main focus of the book community seems to be fiction (easier to enjoy with friends I guess), so I would love to hear your top non-fic picks of the last years and the reason for your decision. Any books that changed the way you look at certain things?
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. It's like reading a dream. Everything flows from subject to subject, seemingly effortlessly. One moment you're reading about a Chinese empress, another moment about silkworms and the German propaganda during World War Two.
It's great.
The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. It's about statistics and randomness (very approachable, though). It made me realize how little I appreciated the impact of randomness and things like Bayesian statistics.
Pandoras Lab. It's about seven times science and it's discoveries led to bad/dark events in world history. Super educational book, but it talks about all of the events in a way that keeps you interested. Definitely recommend to anyone, you don't have to be super into science to enjoy.
I have been reading The Book of Why by Judea Pearl. He is responsible for some fundamental innovations that gave rise to modern machine learning, but over the last few decades has been trying to figure out how to get a machine to do causal reasoning instead of just correlational reasoning. If you are a trained statistician or data scientist or whatever, you are going to be more interested in his academic papers or the work of other authors on causal inference. However, if, like me, you’re just a layperson with an interest in statistics, Pearl’s new book is written for you. It’s partly a history of stastical reasoning, partly a theory of cognition, and partly a description of his framework for doing causal inference. Very interesting so far.
If I can tempt you with something written in the 80s instead of a month ago, I highly recommend Cadillac Desert. To my knowledge, it has yet to be surpassed in its status as the best comprehensive history of water in the American West. Although on that note, if anyone has any good resources on how things have been changing on that topic in the last thirty five years, I would love to hear them. But this book is also super fun to read, and will get you thinking about how bizarre a lot of water-related infrastructure we take for granted really is, at least in the US. I like it so much I’ve even been sneaking it into fiction recommendations!