100 Best English Nonfiction Books of Twentieth Century | Hacker News Reader

100 Best English Nonfiction Books of Twentieth Century

randomhouse.com

10 pointstokenadult31 comments

This list is somewhat dated. After looking through the editor's top 100, many of these are indeed very good. However, a cursory glance through the 'Readers' list reveals some strange/unexpected list members, that might suggest strange/skewed sample population.

Things that immediately stood out as different:

- 3 Rand books in the top 6? Really?

- 2 Scientology / Anti Psychology books near the top (#2, #11)

A look at the fiction list reveals the same bias:

Top 10 from the 'Novels List'

  ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
  THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
  BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
  1984 by George Orwell
  ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
  WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
  MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

There are still gems in these lists, I'm just surprised that many of these made the list, especially some of the high ranking ones. Something seems off.

I'm thinking someone might have gamed the system. Not sure who is eligible to vote, but an organization might be able to encourage it's members to participate in the poll?

"vote early, vote often"

7 top 10's shared between Ayn Rand and Hubbard, there's no question if someone gamed the system it's guaranteed.

The readers version of the non-fiction list is so bizarre it obviously isn't a random poll. Like 80% of the list are political and exceptionally odd choices too.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm not from the US, but I've never heard of most of the books on the list and I'm well red. The books I have heard of are the political ones, most of which people I know would never dream of touching. I just have serious disbelief that so many Americans would read books from Rand and Hubble, yet in the fiction list there's like two mentions of genuinely famous writers.

The Radcliffe's Rival 100 is what I expect to see from a public list where Rand's publications are somewhere in the list, not clustered at the top. I mean why are all the classics like in Radcliffe's list missing from the public list when these are books everybody has read. I read a lot of these books in school, and I know lots of them are taught in american schools so why aren't they on the list?

I mean for fucks sakes, honestly why isn't there a book like Winne-the-Pooh in the public list?

Yup, it does indeed look like a vocal minority may have skewed the outcome a little there...

However, a cursory glance through the 'Readers' list reveals some strange/unexpected list members, that might suggest strange/skewed sample population.

Yes, the reader-nominated list illustrates the systematic defect of voluntary response polls. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

"From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

"Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest 'poll.' All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves."

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

The "readers" are obviously not well read. Two Ayn Rand books and the ever popular "Dianetics" in the top three?

Laughable.

you'll find most "best of" lists of this sort include a lot of heavily ideological stuff. this is because these are the works that have the most memorable impact and actually change people's opinions. Whether you find such works valuable depends largely on where you're coming from when you read it.

for example dianetics: the kind of person who will read and recommend it is the kind of person who was already against psychology to begin with. people use popular non-fiction for confirmation bias and appeal to majority bias.

I studied psychology, I guess thats why I see dianetics as a laughable farce.

You should never assume that mass opinion knows anything. Even when it does, it tends to be shallow and misguided.

I suspect it's more because these books have a fanatical following, the kind of people who want to deliberately manipulate 'Best Of...' lists to give their beliefs more publicity.

Nor is the "The Board", if they have to include books that obviously none of them have read. Has anyone read Principia Mathematica in the last 70 years? Should anyone have?

Yes, and yes.

Have you, then?

A good chunk of it, many years ago...

My first thought was actually "how does Dianetics even qualify for a nonfiction list?"

I really want to know why people dislike Rand's work. I read Atlas Shrugged and Anthem a few weeks back, and I really liked both of them. Am I missing something, or is it just a matter of opinion?

Partly it's because people read them, decide they know all they need to know about philosophy, and stop right there. Then they get arrogant in conversations and denounce people who disagree with them. They use Ayn Rand as an excuse to justify their own lack of worth under the excuse that society doesn't understand them or that most people don't appreciate their work.

Rand also gets very preachy, especially in the end of Atlas Shrugged. It's a terrific climax, but it's not at all a balanced finale. When she condemns people who live in society to a death by train explosion, she's getting a leetle bit heavy-handed.

Rand changed my life when I read her, and I still agree with most of the tenants of Objectivism. That said, I do not like her followers and I think that her works need to be taken with at least a slight sense of perspective; otherwise, you'll start acting foolish.

I'm not judging the value of what she says; merely the fact that in no way are her books 2 out of the top 3 from the last century.

Checked both lists for "Godel, Escher, Bach". Since it's not present in either list, we can conclude that we should pay attention to neither.

Although the Board's list does include Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman.

I would be interested in hearing nominations by HN readers of good English nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. Presumably, the selection bias in this voluntary response poll would include the interest predilections of HN readers, but that's a selection bias that might very likely choose some books that I would like.

I noticed that, I have it on my shelf and I'm trying to convince my wife to read it. I've also been trying to get her to read Feynman's biographies, because I think he has one of the best thought-processes I've ever come to understand.

I saw that and wondered why they didn't just include the entire Feynman Lecture series. The list wasn't supposed to be the most approachable non-fiction books. But then "best" is vague enough to be interpreted that way, I suppose.

Yeah, and no "Snowcrash" either. I call shenanigans on this so called "board"! ;-)

No Solzhenitsyn either.

How the two lists on the submitted link were compiled:

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best.html

A somewhat useless list -- who cares about the 100 Best? I care about which book I'll learn the most from right now. I forced myself through a bunch of classics in high school without learning much from them. Eventually I realized that I can judge what I'm getting out of something by my level of interest. If I can't get interested in a book, despite working hard to find something of interest in it, then I'm wasting my time.

The best books to read aren't necessarily the best books. For example, I just happened to pick up Creation by Gore Vidal while halfway through Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind which I happened to pick up after a painful breakup caused by incompatible cultural assumptions. It was a happy coincidence, reading exactly the books I needed at the time and getting the most out of each as a result.

What's the point of lists like this if reading is so personal and context-dependent?

Also, number 24 is The Mismeasure of Man, which isn't a particularly good book -- just a popular book on an important subject. How many other books on the list are mediocre books that address noble topics? By the number of noble topics addressed, I would guess quite a few.

I spent four relatively enjoyable years sequencing DNA in the lab and on the computer. I met James Watson one time. The Double Helix is one of the most boring books that I’ve ever read. I’ll add this one to the list of popular, mediocre books that address noble topics.

It's worth mentioning that this is a very old list, and one that's been mocked since pretty much the day it was published. Their methodology meant that popular books were placed higher than any one critic thought they deserved. Case in point for fiction: Brave New World was considered by most critics to have some value, but nobody would have considered it for a Top 10 position.

Probably the only correctly-placed book in the fiction list was Ulysses. Several mindblowing pieces were completely ignored for the sake of name recognition, both in the original and the Radcliffe list.

Most of the top 30 look like a recommended reading list from Mises.org. Not that they're bad books, it's just an interesting coincidence.

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