Hey friends! I've been on a non-fiction kick recently, but have been reading a lot of heavy heavy topics (my last 3 reads were: The Rape of Nanking, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, and Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism). I've learned a lot from them, but I'm nearing a saturation point and could use a lighter read to mix things up.
I have loved deep, academic-ish, dives into "unserious" topics – for example, Algospeak by Adam Aleksic which dives into the linguistics behind Tiktok slang and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals by Caitlin Doughty.
Any suggestions of similar books are highly appreciated! They can be as banal or as wacky as you want – I'm open to learning about anything.
by suchabohr
3 Comments
What If and How To by Randall Munroe.
Both give you serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. The former questions like “what if the solar system was soup?” And the latter questions like “how to build a lava moat around your home”
How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History’s Deadliest Catastrophes by Cody Cassidy
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It’s a novelization of how chaos theory became modernized. It doesn’t go super deep into the mathematics, just tells the story of the subject.