Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

Oh boy, I should have checked out the Goodreads rating and reviews before buying this one. But I couldn’t resist! It was on sale at Chapters, and a whole book that seems to be about the history of writing? Sure, I flipped through the first few pages and detected a slightly pretentious tone—but I just thought it meant the author was very passionate and serious about their topic! I was seduced, I say! Seduced!

Palimpsest:…

This may not be the best book I read all year, but it is the best non-fiction book I’ve read so far in 2019, and any future non-fiction book this year is going to have to work hard to unseat this one. Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World snuck up on me. When I received my eARC from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press, I was anticipating a mildly interesting book…

Reader, I finished the first chapter but could not go any further. The writing (or maybe copyediting) of this book is atrocious.

I know that in this day and age commas are misunderstood beasts of punctuation. As someone very invested in eradicating comma splices from my students’ writing, I tend to lean on the side of using fewer commas when in doubt. Yet this book takes that position to the extreme. The result are torturous…

I love behind-the-scenes looks at industries that we don’t often think about. Whether you’re buying a game in the store or downloading it from Steam, chances are you aren’t that knowledgeable about what the game development industry is actually like. Oh, you might have read some horror stories on Reddit, heard some of the gossip going back and forth on gaming blogs. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are…

It’s hard to describe or summarize this book. Educated is a memoir about growing up in rural Idaho to very religious parents who do not trust public education or the medical establishment. Westover’s father believes that the end of days will be on them soon, and he takes prepping to an extreme. Consequently, most of the family never goes to high school. As Westover watches some of her siblings leave home, either to college or…

Algorithms are increasingly an important part of our lives, yet even as more of us become aware of this, how much do we actually stop to consider what that means? How much do we stop to consider who is designing these algorithms and how they actually work? And why are we willing to give up so much control to them in the first place? Hello World is a short tour through the various ways in…

Do you know what’s happening in Darfur right now? Because I definitely don’t—Darfur Diaries is about events from 2004, and in the 15 years that have elapsed, the situation has continued to change. So why read a book that is so out of date? Firstly, I bought this book somewhat less than recently—not in 2006, of course, but maybe 5 years ago. Secondly, the subject is still interesting and important enough to merit reading…

I’ve had Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari’s later book, sitting in a box waiting to be read for a couple of years now (because that’s how I roll). My bestie Amanda recently purchased Sapiens on the strength of several recommendations, with someone even suggesting she could use it as a university course textbook. However, she is neck-deep in writing a PhD thesis right now, so I’m subbing in! I do loves me some world…

So one day I was looking for some advertisements I could use with my English classes to discuss graphic texts and advertising strategies. I stumbled across Vintage Ad Browser's repository of Coca-Cola advertisements, and I was just captivated. It had never occurred to me before that Coca-Cola provides a perfect opportunity to chart the evolution of advertising over the course of more than a century. I pulled many ads through the decades to use with…

Sometimes it seems like smug people like to point smugly to science to justify their smug opinions about their superiority. Alas, many of these people turn out to be men declaiming the natural inferiority of women. As much as some men would like you to believe it, however, “science” doesn’t prove that women are naturally inferior to men. As Angela Saini explains in her book of the same name, “science” backs up what many of…

Pink is for girls and blue is for boys, and that’s just the way it is, right? Girls like nurturing toys and boys like toys that involve motion or action, and don’t even bother trying to change those habits—they’re ingrained at birth, yeah? Doubtless you’ve heard these and other stereotypes and claims about the biological origins of sex differences. In some cases, such as the pink/blue divide, you might already be aware of the history…

Self-driving cars, or more broadly, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are really cool. I’m excited to see them become a reality. Nevertheless, there is a lot of hype around this topic. It seems like most of what I read about the subject comes from someone connected to the tech industry or the auto industry (or both), and that always makes me suspicious. No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future is a…

The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality is a history book masquerading as a physics book, and I like that. I’m just as interested in the history of science as I am in science itself. As the title implies, Paul Halpern focuses on the lives of Feynman and Wheeler, protégés who individually and collectively had their fingers on the pulse of physics for much of the twentieth century. Halpern…

One year ago I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, in which she remembers the seven Indigenous youths who died far from home while attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School here in Thunder Bay. In that heartbreaking and essential work, she links these deaths to a structure of colonialism and white supremacy and an ongoing form of cultural genocide in which the government and the rest of us remain complicit. Now Talaga is back…

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This…

While I was not a fan of the last collection of Massey Lectures that I read, the brilliant thing about this series is that every year is very different. Each year brings a new speaker, a new topic, and an entirely new way of approaching the topic and the format. (I am very excited for this year’s lectures delivered by Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers). Last year’s lectures by Payam Akhavan work…

This was a birthday gift, along with A Criminal Magic, from my friend Amanda, and I’m just now getting to it—which, especially when it comes to my non-fiction backlog, isn’t actually that bad of a delay! Amanda was just getting to know me at the time, so she picked two books off my to-read list. I’m not sure why I had Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety…

After finishing Lost in Math, I decided it was time to dive into a pop physics book I’ve had sitting on my shelf for a while now. It’s pure coincidence that The Universe in the Rearview Mirror also happens to be about the predominance of symmetry in theoretical physics. In Dave Goldberg’s case, however, he isn’t arguing about the philosophy behind this approach. He’s totally on board, and he’s here to explain to laypeople…

Is truth beauty and beauty, truth? It can be hard to tell.

In Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, Sabine Hossenfelder argues that these two concepts are not equivalent. As the subtitle implies, Hossenfelder feels that theoretical physicists are too obsessed with creating “beautiful” theories, in the sense that the mathematics that underpins the theories (because these days, theories are basically math, even though, as Hossenfelder stresses, physics isn’t math) must be…

It took me a while, but I figured out why it took me so long to read this book: the typeface.

That might seem picky, or petty, but it's true. This small, heavyweight, sans serif typeface just did not appeal to me. I trucked on—because this book is definitely reading—but I did not, alas, enjoy the actual experience of reading it. Your mileage will probably vary, but typography is something I’m sensitive to.

Anyway,…