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As a card-carrying member of the “nerd” category, my favorite use of free time around the holidays is to lock myself away in a room reading: 1) the books I bought for myself when I was supposed to be shopping for gifts for others, 2) the books I bought for others before giving them (trying not to spill coffee on them or fray the edges).
I'm also a card-carrying member of the “psychology professor” category (a subset of nerds), so I must also point out that books have countless therapeutic functions, not the least of which is to keep you from finishing annoying work projects you don’t really want to be working on anyway. This distraction function can actually have unforeseen positive consequences, and ironically make you enjoy your job more in the long run. For example, I snuck off to the bookstore and picked up anthropologist Jane Lancaster’s Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture when I was supposed to be in the library studying for my comps in social psychology. That attempt to waste an afternoon changed the course of my career, leading me to spend the next three decades studying evolutionary influences on human thought and behavior.
So if you’ve been wasting time reading when you should have been shopping, here’s a list of books sure to please the intellectual nerds on your list, some sure to appeal particularly to those who like to think about the roots human behavior in light of new ideas from biology, anthropology, and other fields; others fairly guaranteed to appeal to people who merely enjoy reading.
Some of these books are a few years old, and a few are perhaps out of print, but you can probably find those at the local used bookstore. If you are shopping for littler people see my list of recommendations of great books for kids, based on reviews by my two sons, aged 6 and 32 (Gift books for your inner child, or your outer one )
Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. I started reading this whilst lounging around at a bed and breakfast on a small island off Vancouver. Normally, I would not have read a book about being a chef, but there was nothing else around. Good thing, though: the writing and the story itself were absolutely brilliant and entirely engaging. As Bourdain tells it, there is, behind the linen-tabled crystal-and-silver understated elegance of your favorite upscale restaurant, likely to be lurking a team of hard-drinking drug-abusing foul-mouthed characters in the kitchen (if racing around with sharp cutlery at 80 mph can be considered lurking). Bourdain's own personal story, involving a college dropout who goes to the Culinary Institute of America, later stumbles around New York working for Mafiosi, and all along takes an almost sexual pleasure from food, is fascinating. Apparently, there’s also a lot of real sex linked up with fine cuisine, as in the case of the chef whose food was so inspiring that the bride herself felt compelled to sneak off and copulate with him between scenes at the ceremony.
Rick Bragg: All over but the shoutin' Rick Bragg grew up dirt poor in the deep South with a drunk redneck for a father. But he went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, and to then buy a nice house for his long-suffering mother. He tells his story beautifully in this book.
Mary Karr: The liar's club. Mary Karr also grew up poor -- in an East Texas refinery town -- with an artist mother who was occasionally psychotic and once tried to burn the house down. As a little girl, Mary hung out with her rough heavy-drinking father and his card-playing cronies, who called themselves the Liars' Club. It doesn’t sound like a funny or pleasant story, but her way of putting it all into words is positively delightful.
Historical Nonfiction
Deborah Cadbury: The lost king of France: How DNA solved the mystery of the murdered son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. This story is fascinating at more than one level, as much for the account of what the French revolutionaries did to Marie and her son, the dauphine, as for the modern scientific hunt to determine whatever happened to him - did he die in prison, or was one of the men who later claimed his identity the real prince?
Misha Glenny: McMafia: A journey through the global criminal underworld. This book opens with a murder (of the wrong person) in London, and moves beyond to an absolutely shocking account of the new wave of criminals from the Soviet Union, India, Africa, South America, and the Middle East, who seem to be taking over the world from the older class of local hoods.
Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A story of violent faith. Begins with the story of Ron and Dan Lafferty, fundamentalist Mormons who murdered their brother’s wife and infant daughter, believing they were on a mission from God. Krakauer moves from the story of this particular homicide to the controversial history of the Mormon church, and its crazier spin-offs. Krakauer’s more recent Where Men Win Glory, is also a great read. It’s about Pat Tillman -- the guy who left behind a multi-million contract with the NFL to fight in Afghanistan (whose death by “friendly fire” was covered up by the military to avoid bad PR for the war).
Cool science
Sean B. Carroll: Endless Things Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo. You wouldn’t think a story about “regulatory genes” could be fascinating, but this one is – it’s popular science at its very best. It explains why and how, for example, we can share so many genes not only with chimps, but also with insects (natural selection hangs onto genes that work, so the same genes that controlled the development of Beatle John Lennon's guitar-playing appendages control the development of a beetle's six legs).
Sean B. Carroll: The Making of The Fittest: DNA and the ultimate forensic record of evolution. This book may even be better than Endless Things Most Beautiful, but I read the other one first, so may have been primed to love his stuff. Carroll opens with a description of the genetic science behind forensics, and goes on to explain how that same logic has been used to understand some absolutely amazing aspects of evolution.
John Alcock: When the Rains Come: A naturalist’s year in the Sonoran Desert. If you drove through Arizona on a freeway, you might think that the Sonoran Desert is more or less, umm, deserted. But Alcock’s books make it come alive, with enthralling accounts of the brilliant adaptations of the insects and plants that burst forth in beautiful living color when the rains come (but are hiding there between shows). This book differs from his earlier books (such as Sonoran Desert Summer) in that it is filled with the lovely photos Alcock has taken during his decades of studying the region. It also tells a troubling substory of human impact on the desert. Alcock’s popular textbook Animal Behavior: An evolutionary approach has been a best-seller for decades, and for good reason. If you are interested in evolution and behavior, incidentally, you’ll also likely enjoy his earlier book: The Triumph of Sociobiology.
Books about behavior
Sonja Lyubomirsky: The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. When I was preparing to write a trade book of my own, I read a pile of recent trade books about psychology. There are a lot of good books out there, but this was perhaps my favorite. It does a brilliant job of integrating rigorous research with practical advice – about how to live a happier, more fulfilled, life. I've already given it a number of people, which predictably made me feel like a better person. For two very different takes on the psychology of happiness, check out Dan Gilbert’s and Jon Haidt’s books (below)
Dan Gilbert: Stumbling on Happiness. For years, social psychologists pointed to Dan Gilbert’s journal articles to prove to students that one could write in an engaging style even in scientific papers. Apparently, Gilbert wanted to be a writer in his youth, and this book masterfully fuses his earlier self and his present incarnation as a clever social cognition researcher. When my wife read a draft of the book I just finished, she commented (semi-tactfully) that I “at many points write in a clever, engaging, way, like Dan Gilbert,” but she recommended that I revise the other parts in that direction. So, umm, thanks Dan.
Jonathan Haidt: The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. As a philosophy student who later turned to psychology, Haidt takes a much more serious approach to happiness here, culling philosophical history for 10 Great Ideas about how to live a more fulfilling life.
Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions - In this engaging, highly readable, and often funny book, Dan Ariely masterfully describes research on behavioral economics revealing some of the ways in which our mental heuristics can lead us astray.
Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Pinker is a deservedly famous author, whose books The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works are well-known to anyone with a remote interest in evolution and behavior. This earlier book focuses specifically on the evolution of language, and may still be my favorite, for the power of its arguments and the cohesiveness of its story.
Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson (2009). The Superorganism: The beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies. Hölldobler and Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for their earlier book The Ants, and this book further explores the absolutely fascinating levels of complexity that emerge out of the interactions of small-brained social insects. Even if you don’t have much interest in entomology, it’s hard not find yourself saying “wow” at the story (and the beautiful pictures).
Noah Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, & Robert Cialdini – Yes! 50 Scientifically proven ways to be persuasive. I have a vested interest in this one, Bob Cialdini was my graduate school mentor and is coauthor of my social psychology textbook, and Noah Goldstein is a graduate of our program (now on the business faculty at UCLA). But the truth is that I’ve heard them both talk about influence so much that I expected not to learn much from this book. Alas, I was pleasantly surprised: the book is not only a great read, it is chock full of engaging and useful examples and research findings – 50 mini-chapters full, in fact.
Robert Sapolsky: A Primate’s Memoir: A neuroscientist’s unconventional life among the baboons. This one actually crosses categories, in a delightful way. It is a beautifully told account of science and personal adventure; Sapolsky grew up in New York but finds himself hitchhiking around Africa, between bouts of life with a troupe of baboons, whom he comes to regard as more like the people in his old neighborhood than like members of another species.
I guess that was a hyperactive baker's dozen
I could go on, and I even have a whole list of fiction titles I was going to include here, but gosh, I’ve got to get busy buying Christmas presents for my friends and relatives. So I’d better leave that for later, and get over to the local bookstore now!
Related post (recommendations of beautifully written and illustrated books for kids and six psychologically compelling novels):
