Favorite Nonfiction Literature

Why do we invariably seem to link literature with fiction? If you ask most people what comes to mind when you say "great literature" they’ll almost always come back with Shakespeare or Dickens or any number of great authors of fiction, or great pieces of fiction.

Why is this? Could it be, I wonder, if it’s because so much nonfiction is written for a specific time about specific events? If there was a great book written about, for example, the 1896 U.S. Presidential election, surely it would be relegated by now to mere historical trivia.

What must it take, then, for a piece of nonfiction to go on to become "classic" and timeless? It seems to me it would have to be about timeless ideas. Philosophical works come to mind, from Plato’s Republic to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza’s Ethics or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Religious literature as well, although one risks opening a real can of worms in defining what’s fiction and what’s nonfiction, much of it being ultimately a matter of faith. Political ideas (e.g., Marx, Adam Smith, The Federalist Papers) would certainly qualify.

And beyond the groundbreaking ideas, it seems to me that great nonfiction literature has to be, like any literature, extremely well written. Nietzsche, for example, was every bit a writer as much as a philosopher. Meanwhile, works like Tao Te Ching read like poetry.

All of which is to ask, what is your favorite nonfiction piece of literature, and why?

And, as a follow-up, if somebody asked you to name your favorite pieces of literature prior to this discussion of fiction versus nonfiction, would you have considered that piece to be among them?

Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire"

Macaulay's "History of England"

And lady travellers - Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Edith Durham, Alexandra David-Neel, Freya Stark ...

The Spirit of the Age - Hazlitt

patrick mcmanus has got to be one of my favorite non-fiction story tellers. one of the few writers ive read who makes me laugh right out loud as i'm reading. he writes about his outdoor adventures as a kid and as an adult in idaho.

i remember particularly enjoying roger kahn's "a flame of pure fire"---a jack dempsey biography.

i appreciated jane leavy's romantic treatment of sandy koufax in "a lefty's legacy".

A couple books about the sea suddenly come to mind (must have something to do with bounty's name and avatar):

Two Years Before the Mast - Richard Henry Dana
Sailing Alone Around the World - Capt. Joshua Slocum

I beleive it has something to do with the fact that only fiction has a beginning, middle, and end. Over time, that formula has become what we expect when we read, and when we don't get it, there is something left unsatisfied. It's always really hard to read non-fiction, simply because a lot of things have to be altered in order to package it into a readable format, and even then, it still doesn't read as well as fiction.

Religious works and philosophy just don't seem to be things people read for enjoyment.

^__^ Too much thinking, maybe, when for a lot of people books aren't a pursuit of enlightenment or knowledge, but rather a form of escapism.

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Originally Posted by BeccaT

I beleive it has something to do with the fact that only fiction has a beginning, middle, and end. Over time, that formula has become what we expect when we read, and when we don't get it, there is something left unsatisfied. It's always really hard to read non-fiction, simply because a lot of things have to be altered in order to package it into a readable format, and even then, it still doesn't read as well as fiction.

Religious works and philosophy just don't seem to be things people read for enjoyment.

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Wrong, those are niched fields. Fiction is actually but one aspect of literature. Non-fiction is far more read than fiction (just look at all the magazine guzzling people in society, far outweighing the novel readers by a long shot). Religious works can be read for enjoyment if they are read for enjoyment. Many people dismiss the Bible these days because it is a religious text, but they fail to realize that it is also one of the greatest literary texts ever written (well, the KJV and the original Hebrew anyway, modern translations are terrible). Same with other books. Philosophy is enjoyable to read to those who are interested in it. None of its answers seem to interest anyone who isn't interested in philosophy anyway. The whole field is like a long conversation that takes years of reading to understand. The same thing with literary criticism and theory, which is the philosophical side to literature, and an extremely prolific, yet niched field. These are just specific genres, not unread fields.

True, I apologize. I looked at that extremely objectively and from a personal standpoint and failed to include many of your arguments in my answer.

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Originally Posted by Chester

A couple books about the sea suddenly come to mind (must have something to do with bounty's name and avatar):

Two Years Before the Mast - Richard Henry Dana
Sailing Alone Around the World - Capt. Joshua Slocum

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chester, ive got two years before the mast but havent read it yet. i love seafaring adventures; the bounty trilogy is one of my favorites, and i really enjoyed the sea wolf by jack london. i also like the horatio hornblower books. can you say if two years before the mast is anything like those?

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Originally Posted by bounty

chester, ive got two years before the mast but havent read it yet. i love seafaring adventures; the bounty trilogy is one of my favorites, and i really enjoyed the sea wolf by jack london. i also like the horatio hornblower books. can you say if two years before the mast is anything like those?

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Well, in one sense Dana's book doesn't have the same kind of excitement as a lot of other seafaring adventures (there's no battle scenes, for instance, although there are some wonderfully well-written passages about storms, and rounding the Horn, etc.) but it's a fascinating book in its own right because Dana wrote it from the perspective of a common sailor, which is what he was. You really get a great feel for what life was like, not for the captain or officers, but for the common seaman. It's a rare book in that regard, I think, and a very worthwhile one.

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Originally Posted by Chester

Well, in one sense Dana's book doesn't have the same kind of excitement as a lot of other seafaring adventures (there's no battle scenes, for instance, although there are some wonderfully well-written passages about storms, and rounding the Horn, etc.) but it's a fascinating book in its own right because Dana wrote it from the perspective of a common sailor, which is what he was. You really get a great feel for what life was like, not for the captain or officers, but for the common seaman. It's a rare book in that regard, I think, and a very worthwhile one.

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thanks chester, i'll look forward to reading it sometime then...i just picked up a book on the history of the dust bowl that im looking forward to also...

I really like Malcolm Gladwell. He's written "Blink" and "The Tipping Point," two psychology books that are fascinating and thoroughly entertaining.

And yes, I include "Blink" in my "favorite books list" all the time. Despite the fact that it's mostly neuroscience stuff, the ending made me cry. I was just very touched. And Gladwell has an excellent way with words.

Excellent post and I wrote a long reply yesterday but lost it before I could post:(

I read, mainly, non-fiction. This site brought me back to fiction but my main obsessions are literary theory, literary criticism, philosophy and the history of ideas. Strangely there are some texts that I read many years ago and that provided me with foundation to build something on and these texts stay my favorites after almost two decades. People like Hugh Kenner, Arnold Toynbee, Will and Ariel Durant (I have a whole set of The Story of Civilisation waiting to be read), Jaques Derrida, Edward Said etc. My favorite books happen to be the ones that opened ways to other and more focused texts. I always like works that lead to other works and thus form a 'literature network'. Some of my favorites are (Not in the order of preference):

Orientalism by Edward Said
The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant(sounds old fashioned and wordy now but once it turned my whole life around).
A Colder Eye: Modern Irish Writers and The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner.
The Clash of Fundamentalisms by Tariq Ali.
Art and Beauty in Middle Ages by Umberto Ecco
Rousseau and Romanticism by Irving Babbitt.
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Acts of Literature by Jaques Derrida
The Ear of the Other by Jaques Derrida
An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism by Madan Sarup (an old book, written in the time when postmodernism used to be 'post-modernism' still it provided the basis for my love for this period in recent history).
The Dialogues by Plato
Essays Francis Bacon
Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb (that, the most lovable and touching of the good old Victorians).

I always found Capital to be a good read.Very simple and lightweight,as well:D

Also,from the guy in my avatar - the extremely loveable Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation.

And,last but not least,The Birth of Tragedy,a great read.

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

My favorite books happen to be the ones that opened ways to other and more focused texts. I always like works that lead to other works and thus form a 'literature network'.

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This is very interesting to me. I think books dealing with philosophy and the history of ideas are natural for progressing somebody from one work to the next. They all kind of link up somehow. I picked up a book called God and the New Physics by Paul Davies a long, long time ago and it ultimately sent me on a journey from one book of ideas to the next in a very circuitous route that eventually (20? 30 books later?) landed me upon the doorstep of A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the book I suppose I would have to count as my favorite non-fiction work. I needed every book until that one, though, to get there, or to begin to appreciate it.

Maybe that’s the hallmark of a good piece of nonfiction. It makes you want to progress and take the next step; it opens up an idea to you which leads to another idea or set of ideas. Even Whitehead, the pinnacle for me philosophically, has led me elsewhere, in other (non-philosophical) ways.

Montaigne's Essays, The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, and Plato's Republic are all on my top shelf with my favorite fiction. Thoreau's Walden is somewhat lower, but it was a book that changed my life many years ago. Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is still sitting on my "to be read" shelf because it's very long and I haven't gotten around to finishing it. But yeah, it's the sweet spot.

What do I like about each of them. I suppose I liked the way Montaigne would synthesize information, the turn of his mind, and the friendly good humored nature of his voice. You felt a real warmth and intelligence communicated to you through the essays, in a way that you wouldn't get from another essay writer such as Bacon. La Rochefoucauld was a sharp observant customer, kind of like Bacon, but even more succinct. He manages to distill his argument and point of view down to a few well chosen words, and his sentences sparkle like diamonds. The only other book that impressed me in quiet the same way as Plato's Republic was Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante obviously modeled his structure on Plato, and you can see how one part builds methodically on top of the previous sections and each subsequent part incorporates all that's come before into itself. You start to see the ways Plato is developing meaning across a number of different levels, and then it hits you, this book is a road map for the last two thousand years of history. Then it's got this ending which is shear literary artistry. I started reading Gibbon because I have a thing for ancient societies and the Romans especially, but his sentence structure is unlike anything I've ever seen. It has this balance, and flow, and weight that's magnificent. I'd like to take it apart sometime and see how he does it. Thoreau I've already mentioned.

Certainly among my favorite reads I would include Montaigne's Essays, Walter Pater's essays (especially The Renaissance), J.L. Borges non-fictions, Rousseau's Confessions, Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson and Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson's Essays and Journey of the western Islands of Scotland, Goethe's Italian Journey, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholia. There are any number of other wonderful works of non-fictions of which I am also fond: Andre Malraux's The Voices of Silence, Vasari's The Lives of the Artists, Paul Valery's Degas, Dance, Drawing, Robert Hughes The Shock of the New, John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, etc..., Sir Kenneth Clark's The Nude and Civilization, Alberto Manguel's History of Reading, Octavio Paz' essays, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, etc... Clearly I would have no problem with placing non-fiction among my list of the greatest books written. We have brought up the issue of the dominance... or rather the assumption that when one is asked to name his or her favorite book many immediately list a series of novels... but rarely ever non-fiction, or theater (outside of Shakespeare), or even poetry. I think there is a similar bias in the visual arts. When asked to list ones ten favorite works of art the list are invariably a collection of paintings... and maybe sculpture... no prints, textiles, book arts, glass, or even architecture.

One book I missed to mention is Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. This along with the two Hugh Kenner books I mentioned earlier can give a very solid basis for a good understanding of modernism. Anybody interested in this period must start with Wilson's book for a better overall picture, specially the importance of the French influences and move on to Kenners books to bring focus on to modernism in more familiar literature with special reference to Ireland and the US.

I am surprised that Axel's Castle is still in print. Read the customer's reviews on Amazon page. It seems it, still, has a strong following:

http://www.amazon.com/Axels-Castle-I...9734750&sr=8-1

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

One book I missed to mention is Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930.

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I took that one down off a shelf a few weeks back while I was reading Proust. I've got to say, I wasn't impressed.

Written in 1931, this book was far ahead of its time in terms of the understanding of its subject. I would still recommend it as the starting point to an understanding of modernism. Last time I read it was in 1996 (having it read in early 90s for the first time). I might find it too basic if I revisit it now but it did do the job of directing me towards modernism nicely. I revisited The Story of Philosophy after 22 years recently. It seemed wordy and bombastic but back in my early youth, it implanted the love for philosophy in me very effectively. Our preferences and standards change over time.

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

The Story of Philosophy after 22 years recently. It seemed wordy and bombastic but back in my early youth, it implanted the love for philosophy in me very effectively. Our preferences and standards change over time.

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I like Durant. I read his The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time two or three months ago. It was a pleasant read. He has excellent style, and knows his material very well. I took out a copy of his The Story of Civilization: II The Life of Greece about that time and couldn't get into it though. It's thick, dense, weighty. I got thirty pages in and he was still talking about the Minoan civilization. What I really wanted to read about was Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Pericles. A similar thing happened when I cracked open The Story of Philosophy. He's primarily a historian and that's where he starts. I'm getting all of this history, and wondering when the philosophy will start. I tried to cut my teeth on Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy around the same time, and I found that he too dealt more in history than in concepts. Everybody recommends these books for an introduction to philosophy, but I find the primary texts to be so much more engaging.

I shouldn't blame Durant and Russell though. What I'm really looking for is more of a textbook style. I'll probably just get one of those used books from some college philosophy class.

I recommend the collected essays of both Michael Foot, the English journalist & politician and those of Virginia Woolf.

The English prose works of John Milton, particularly Areopagitica, stand out as literary works of the highest order.