With summertime in the northern hemisphere, dead tree summer reading is the siren's call. These past few years, I've had difficulty determining what non-fiction to read. Publishers are presenting texts in search of a culture that does not exist or political horses that have already been beaten to death - or as I like to say, anything but relevant. For storytelling, my non-fiction informs my fiction. Who else is as frustrated as I am?
There's not a lot of non-fiction on SOL, but personally, since I write a lot of sci-fi, I often review the NY Times Tuesday Science Section, as the reports on new research often inspires new stories (specialized non-fiction).
As for reading, I've always preferred reading non-fiction while writing fiction, as it's less likely to distract or influence my own writing (unintentional copyright violations), as it rarely happens across entirely different genres.
Plus, if I'm writing fiction ALL the time, then reading non-fiction provides entirely new perspectives and a valuable break from my normal work.
American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union by J. Meachum. I recieved an advance copy, so am not certain what the final published product will include.
Meachum is your typical gen-X pseudo-intellectual hack. But even a turkey gets lucky and cranks out something interesting. In any case, I found the book interesting and worth a critical read as a collection of currated works. His selection of shit is good, but Meachum's commentaries are so full of logical fallacies that accumulate, such that by the end of the book you're saying. "WTF, over".
I would have several more recommendations for recently published works, but they are all physics and math shit, so I'll list if so interested.
American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union by J. Meachum.
Released on February 17, 2026. New and used copies are available from $12.
I've recently been on a chinese philosophy kick, of all things, and it's been pretty fascinating. I grabbed a copy of Wu's "Thus Spoke Laozi", his translation and commentary of the dao de jing, and it's very nicely presented. For each chapter, it has the original text, then a line by line translation, and then commentary that goes into some detail about why he translated the verse the way he did, different ways specific characters have been interpreted, and some of the cultural context that informs what Laozi was talking about when he orated the original verses. Fascinating stuff.
After that, I picked up a copy of Ziporyn's translation of the Zhuangzhi to continue with foundational daoist texts, but once I got past the story of the kunpeng I realized that there was a lot of referencing confucius. So I went and got a copy of Slingerland's translation of the Analects, on the theory that if I was about to read a book that spent a lot of time responding to Confucius I should understand what Confucius was saying first. Ziporyn and Slingerland both do a pretty nice job of presenting the text and also giving a solid overview of some critical analysis alongside, which helps a lot when you read something and you're trying to put it into a larger cultural context that makes sense.
Anyways, I don't know if you want to count philosophy as nonfiction but I can firmly recommend Wu's Thus Spoke Laozi, Ziporyn's Zhuangzi, and Slingerland's The Analects. They're all very readable translations that neatly present a good summary of critical analysis alongside the text.
I started this thread, so I should contribute at least.
"When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows" by Steven Pinker,PhD. The text explores the use and misuse of Common Knowledge, that is to say, what everybody knows.
Unfortunately Common Knowledge is like Common Sense, It isn't very common anymore.
Following the ascendancy of Google etc, I believe there is now more common knowledge in the world than there is knowledge.
AJ