The Best Books I Read in 2013
thegatesnotes.com
thegatesnotes.com
Boy oh boy, if I had a quarter every time I heard that probably I could get a tall Starbucks latte. Many, many people are under the assumption that fiction is stuff that somebody made up and hence useless while non-fiction gives you information about the world; so if you're a busy person, read non-fiction (it's of, course debatable if such a neat classification even can be done). What these people do not realize is that great fiction can provide more information about the world, humanity in general, and what's even more important, yourself, then you can ever glimpse by reading another Gladwell book.
It's like all those questions : would you rather do this, or live all your life with this. They are fun, but they are useless as they never happened. There is no point thinking about them besides playing with your imagination.
Fiction is the same to me, yes it came from a real context, but it's still a work of fiction and doesn't teach you anything about real life.
e.g. Are you gonna learn about dating by reading romantic novels or real life stories?
And what is fiction based on, if not real life? Fiction is the number one way to learn how to see the world from the point of view of a completely different person, only in fiction can you leave your own shoes. I'm pretty sure that reading fiction makes you a better person, and it's proven that reading fiction improves a person's empathy [1]. Increased empathy means that you can put yourself into other leaders' heads and guess what made them make their decisions, thereby learning how the world works.
And yes, you can learn about dating from a romance novel, except that about 99% of them are not about real life.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/liter...
As one of "them" who often prefers non-fiction, I enjoyed the book for that reason. Incidentally, I think it's stronger in this fictionalized form than as it would have been as a straight-up autobiography.
Well, since romantic novels aren't really about dating, I'm not sure the question makes sense. A better question would be: "Will you learn more about love from reading fiction or by reading nonfiction?" And for that I think the answer is obvious.
Just because something happened doesn't mean it's useful to think about. Conversely, just because something never happened doesn't mean it isn't useful to think about. I've read fiction books that made me examine my perspective or way of life in a way that nothing else has, and I've read non-fiction books that didn't register a single change in me.
Are you gonna learn about dating by reading romantic novels or real life stories?
You may not learn about dating by reading Ishiguro, but it's the case that the profound humanity of his writing makes you a more compassionate and confident person and that's the kind of stuff that can and will make you more desirable to be around.
"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.
For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen -- and maybe it did, anything's possible -- even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man,' and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.
That's a true story that never happened."
(PS I still read and enjoy fiction. I don't get why everyone's so up in arms about Bill Gate's mild preference for non-fiction)
Your point is moot. Even non-fiction is fiction in a way. The writer may have changed details, selected only specific facts, hidden some parts of the truth. You never know. At least with fiction you KNOW it's made up, but with non-fiction you can not really tell what is true or not because of your limited knowledge of how it was written and redacted.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#The_Geostation...
Well, if you are straight guy, you could learn a lot (everything) about what women want by carefully reading the romance novels they read.
There's also this embedded assumption in your statement and in BG's that non-fiction tells some sort of factual truth about "real life." Negatory.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
As for dating, here's some good advice (assuming you're a man): grab a copy or Pride and Prejudice and read it to get a grasp of the female psyche. And if you don't read it at least carry it around where she will see.
Now, I know that many critics and authors I admire consider P&P to be one of the finest English-language novels ever written, so I have to ask: what am I missing?
With Austen, for a modern reader, there's a lot to appreciate. Her books give a perspective on what life was like as a member of a class (females) in a society which terribly oppressive for them. What would it be like to be a very intelligent, well-read person who is not allowed to hold a job at a professional or managerial level, not allowed to get a college education, not allowed (generally speaking) to travel freely or own property without restrictions. In many respects, this world is as alien to us as anything found in scifi or fantasy and is therefore a fascinating and horrifying view.
Austen will give you this perspective. If you pay attention closely, you can also learn quite a bit about the ground level view of the English class system in the regency period and how it worked for people on varying social strata. Her novel, Emma, is particularly good at this.
Even the focus on courtship and marriage, which many people will find completely frivolous, has an interesting message. I can't find the exact quote so this is from memory, Austen once remarked that her focus on marriage was because the marriage proposal was the one free choice (in terms of refusal) women were allowed to have. And considering the social and legal power the husband would have over the wife, the woman's choice becomes the thing which will determine the course of her life. From this point of view, there's no wonder why marriage is presented as such an overwhelmingly important event.
I hope you'll give her books another chance.
I contend that you'd learn an awful lot more about love and relationships from a novel like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, than you ever will from 'non-fiction' like The Game (which you've mentioned up-thread).
Drawing a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction is in my opinion pointless - you can tell any story you like by using selected facts, you can tell multiple stories with the same facts, and people often do twist the truth when reminiscing and celebrating the past, or present the truth from a very limited, insular point of view in so-called non-fiction books. So in this sense I see non-fiction as very similar to fiction; it's used to tell stories, to present the world as the author sees it, and to educate and entertain. All of these functions are performed by both fiction and non-fiction, and in both cases we're trusting the author to tell us something about the world from their perspective.
The best stories (be they memories of a real-world event, or imagined events based on life experience) transcend the particular and become lessons about human behaviour and life.
Non-fiction teaches you about the world.
Fiction teaches you about yourself.
Good books teach you about the world and about yourself.
But why or how is it good, then? Well, usually because the writer is a good writer (but not always, some books have no writers, or are good despite their bad writers).
And a good writer is just someone who has a very itchy scar somewhere and would die if not using writing as a bloodletting.
I don't see the world or even myself in the same way since.
Also, I would add The Crying of Lot 49 to your list.
http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/
Ulysses is a singular book: Well-worth it if you love language, or for that matter almost anything about life as it is lived.
But then I admittedly have not gotten past page 200 of ulysses in the three times I've tried, so that may be coloring my perception.
EDIT: I see below that you have your own top-level comment in which you mention a history of France you have read, and comment more generally that reading history is generally a good idea. I agree.
For example truth about something like cultural revolution in China or religious wars in Europe is likely best conveyed in books.
Maybe when a truth is so bad it cannot be written then it has to be sung, or hummed, and music would be the deepest and most reptilian way to keep memories.
I like many people, read Shakespeare in high school and disliked it. Reading it again as an adult is a completely different experience, and one I highly recommend.
My favorite play is Titus Andronicus. How often do you have Anger, Rape, and Murder personified on stage, or forced cannibalism? The Quentin Tarantino of Shakespeare for sure.
Some people have argued that nobody should read Shakespeare until after forty. I'm younger than that, but it's true that one of the greatest pleasures of reading great literature is recognition - RE-cognition - and you have to live some before you can recognize something in a piece of art.
You can stream it from PBS's website (there might be some geographic restrictions though, at least according to the comments): http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/macbeth/watch-the-ful...
Really? The usual image is that techie geek types lap up scifi and fantasy, which when done properly are all about the human condition.
It should read:
I would say that all great books (fiction or nonfiction) are about the human condition.
I'd even suggest that some authors, particularly those with strong political views, may be motivated to write fiction in order to give support to their own ideas. It's a blank canvas onto which to project an idealized world, and to fulfill wishes. (If that's the case, it can serve as a mildly negative Bayesian signal about whether the ideas are really true. If there were so many real-world examples illustrating the beliefs, why would the author be moved to write fiction to promote them?)
Apart from politics, plots are more interesting when they're surprising, but almost by definition, surprising plots are less likely to be generalizable to the world.
(Of course, non-fiction can really be fiction in disguise, but at least non-fiction can be fact-checked. To cite a recent Hollywood example, wherever the movie Argo is suspenseful, it's simply made up. Minor spoiler: If you drew a lesson about how going directly against the instructions of both the President and your CIA boss can be a useful tool to cause your boss to suddenly rally around you and later commend your success, you would be gravely misled. Interesting plots thrive on such unrealistic conflict.)
Anyway, this is only a danger if the reader is credulous about what they are reading. But reading a lot of fiction can help a person learn to detect an author's point of view, biases, and, in some cases, hidden agendas.
This learning can be greatly accelerated by training. College-level literature courses teach students the mental framework to critically evaluate any piece of writing.
The danger is - and Argo is one example but there are far, far worse (cough Dan Brown cough) - where you get fiction "based on true events". There are some lovely fictional biopics based on real people (Carter Beats the Devil springs to mind) but when you get the likes of the Da Vinci Code being taken as having some underlying truth I can see where you're coming from.
But I doubt very much that those people believing the "truth" in those works of fiction are the people fact checking non-fiction. In both those cases it feels as if the book isn't the problem, the person is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)
The basic idea (making a sci-fi film as a cover for getting people out of Iran) is true, after that it's fairly heavily dramatised and pro-Americanised.
Worth saying that Affleck has always been relatively upfront about the dramatisation when asked about it in interviews, though I've not seen him asked about his depiction of the actions of the Canadian, British and New Zealand governments.
Thanks for the info, though. I have read about it before, and it's definitely an example of truth being stranger than fiction.
That's what a lot of good fiction is superb at installing in one's mind. It's what books can do like no other medium. Good fiction is as close as listening in on another's thought stream as we get. I think it's particularly valuable for children.
Now, there's also non-fiction writing that can do this - experience reports, auto-biographies, letter collections (some of my most formative young-age reading experiences were Robert Falcon Scott's expedition diaries and his letters of good-bye and regret written near his death). But there's an element of someone presenting themselves to the world there that I think fiction more frequently isn't affected by. Though it's true that authors speak through their characters, so fiction writing isn't unbiased either, of course.
You might not have heard of some of her other novels. One such book, "Pavilion of Women", is almost life changing. It is subtle. It has an unmatched understanding and portrayal of human nature. Everyone I know who's read it has been affected by it.
I can't recommend "Pavilion of Women" enough - it was a magical experience to read it.
All that fiction and still buying into "us and them".
Camus said it best: 'Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.'
I read some of fiction and some of nonfiction, but definitely skew to reading more nonfiction. One nonfiction book, which I think someone on HN told me isn't even the best book on its specific topic, was very meaningful to me and helped me learn a lot about myself. I read the entire book out loud to my dad when he was paralyzed, about three years after his paralyzing accident (which was about three years before he died). The book is The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition,[1] entirely nonfiction, but nonetheless a way to be transported into an earlier time and a place that I am unlikely ever to see in my lifetime. The characters were all real, but they all got me thinking about how I think and about how I get along in life. Great nonfiction can can provide more information about the world, humanity in general, and what's even more important, yourself, then you can ever glimpse by reading another science-fiction novel.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Legendary-Antarc...
However, many people (Bill Gates included apparently) operate under the opposite assumption that non-fiction gives you more information about the world by default. And that's simply not true. Fiction can change your views, give you new ideas and insights, challenge your beliefs, etc.
Fiction writers create based on their life experiences, their feelings and ideas and also the information they got from different sources. It's pure ignorance to assume they only offer brainless entertainment.
And what is the OP arguing about? Mr. Gates didn't say that non-fiction is always better for learning about the world.
>Non-fiction gives you more information about the world by default
Sorry, but it does. Easily testable hypothesis; go to the NY Times Bestsellers lists and compare, book-for-book, what can be "learned" from each (as most of us understand "learning"). In fact, it's hard to believe anyone is actually arguing this point.
Then again, with this community's penchant for nitpicking and distaste for Microsoft, I shouldn't be surprised. As someone who reads 40-50 books a year, I'm always grateful for these lists.
Of course he didn't, he said something worse. The literal quote from Bill Gates is: "But I read mostly nonfiction because I always want to learn more about how the world works".
The immediate conclusion that you can take from that is "if you want to learn more about how the world works, then don't read fiction". It's the assumption that fiction has value only as entertainment.
I'll give you just one example of the opposite. If you want to learn how people in the past thought and viewed the world, then an excellent way is reading the popular fiction of that time. Bonus points if you get to know how they read it.
>Sorry, but it does. Easily testable hypothesis; go to the NY Times Bestsellers lists and compare, book-for-book, what can be "learned" from each (as most of us understand "learning").
Sorry, but if you get to redefine things in order to suit your argument (the word learn), then you are right by default and there can't be any discussion. I won't follow you there.
I know there are excellent non-fiction books that teach you lots of things. But the reverse is true, there are garbage non-fiction books that teach you nothing.
For example: read "Confessions of a Heiress" by Paris Hilton. It's non-fiction, so by your logic, you will surely learn more about the world reading that than something like "1984" by George Orwell, right? Give me a break.
Your problem is assuming there's an immediate conclusion to be drawn.
Maybe you can take a step back and understand that this is a guy writing an article about some good books he read this year, rather than a treatise on the uselessness of fiction. Look at the context. Because I certainly didn't come to "the" immediate conclusion that you did.
A big component of reading comprehension is understanding context. Do you really think the purpose of what he wrote was what you imply? Maybe, but I doubt it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
>I'll give you just one example of the opposite
Coming up with a single counter example doesn't dismiss the general. No one is arguing anywhere (including Mr. Gates) that all fiction is useless to learn from. Does me presenting one useless fiction book and one beneficial non-fiction book prove my point? Because I guarantee I have more examples.
>Sorry, but if you get to redefine things in order to suit your argument
Huh? My definition? I explicitly stated "as most of us understand it". Because, you know, most of us do understand the word a specific way. I stated it as such because I foresaw someone like you jumping in with some pseudo-intellectual argument that "learning is this, learning isthat", when 90% of us agree on what is implied by the phrase "to learn".
>For example: read "Confessions of a Heiress"
Wait a minute: on one hand you're telling me to read popular fiction of days past to gain insight into the views of others, then on the other you dismiss the non-fiction writings of a twentieth century pop-culture icon for its lack of similar insight? Brilliant. If you don't think the writings of someone like Paris Hilton can teach us anything about society and culture, on various levels, I don't know what to tell you.
>by your logic, you will surely learn more about the world reading that than something like "1984" by George Orwell, right? Give me a break.
Yes, that's my logic precisely. All non-fiction is better than fiction </s>.
I'll do the same: Twilight vs. A Brief History of Time. Which can you learn more from? Apparently by your twisted logic and cherry-picking, Twilight. Have fun with that.
Are you trying to argue for the sake of arguing? Not shocking, for the same reason that it wasn't surprising to see the top comment on a "best books I've read list" attacking the nuances of a single, throwaway line in the text, irrelevant to the actual content of the article. This community loves that. I guess it makes people feel smart.
Reread this thread, I didn't claim fiction as a whole is better than non-fiction in any way, but you did claim non-fiction as a whole gives you more information about the world by default, irrespective of individual examples. I'd be thankful if you stopped denying that you said what you said, or at least admit that you were mistaken.
You can't make blanket statements about categories like that, it's a futile exercise because you are putting great books and garbage books in the same box. They aren't all the same, neither in fiction nor in non-fiction. That's the critique we made to Bill Gates' blanket statement.
Instead of arguing for argument's sake, read what I wrote calmly and analyse it, none of your previous answers apply and I don't have the time to answer to each part of your comment. I'll just answer the only one in which you could have a point.
About Paris Hilton's book, it's true that there's some value in it, but you can't compare it to the value that you can take from 1984 and the insights it can give you about society and the human condition. And that was my point, a counterexample to the blanket statement "non-fiction gives you more information about the world than fiction by default". It simply isn't true. Literature is much more complex than that.
And by literature I talk both about fiction and non-fiction, I don't redefine things or refer to an imaginary "most of us".
"Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."
The voyage of the James Caird must account as one of the greatest bits of seamanship in history:
I don't know how we got to the point where so many see entertainment for it's own sake as a negative thing.
Even the pleasure that comes from addiction and drug use indicates that learning is taking place -- learning the context of the 'high' (more and more subtle detail concerning the smell of the coffee, the crackle of the cigarette paper, the label of the wine being poured, the faces of one's fellow drinkers, etc, and linking this information to the pleasure itself).
Contrariwise, if one is not entertained, if one cannot find some pleasurable feature in the situation, then one is learning nothing. So learning without entertainment is not possible either!
However, choosing to read fiction puts no lower bound on the amount of real information you will get nor the amount you will learn about the world, yourself, or humanity. Meanwhile, a non-fictional piece will at least have a reasonable guarantee to contain information of some kind.
* So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport). If you've ever daydreamed about how much better your life would be if you were only working at that cool company, you should seriously read this book. By not focusing on just getting a cool job, but instead doing deliberate practice and being "so good they can't ignore you" you can increase aspects of any job that are scientifically-proven to make you happier (control, autonomy, and expertise).
* The Making of a Chef (Ruhlman). If you have any interest in cooking (even if you just watch Top Chef) you will like this book. A major theme of the book is discipline which aligns well with software; code quality, good design, maintaining a test suite — all of these things are signs of a true craftsmen, but they are easy to shrug off without discipline.
* Are Your Light's On? (Gause, Weinberg). I would recommend it to anyone dealing with arguments about solutions or confusion about problems, especially when non-technical folks are involved. The biggest win for me was making a mental shift from "Problem Solver" to "Solver of Problems", which allows us to focus on finding who is impacted by a problem and identifying the real story behind the problem.
I'm currently reading Punished By Rewards (only halfway through) but it is pretty interesting so far and will probably make the cut on my final list :)
http://bellm.org/blog/2013/11/29/the-best-books-i-read-in-20...
Some books I read this year that stand out:
* Emperor of All Maladies (Mukherjee): Beautiful look into the most elusive disease of our generation. Mukherjee provides a biography of cancer.
* The Art of Learning (Waitzkin): I've been following Josh Waitzkin since I was a little kid. I fell in love with his Chessmaster series. Waitzkin was the inspiration for (and child actor in) Searching for Bobby Fischer. A chess prodigy and former IM, Waitzkin deconstructs his learning style and how it allowed him to become a leading Tai Chi martial artist.
* Humble Pie: Autobiography of Gordon Ramsay. I am a fan and found it pretty honest (although his cockiness leaks in a bit). It's a very quick read.
Some books I enjoyed this year:
* The Player of Games - http://amzn.com/0316005401
* A Guide to Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - http://amzn.com/B0040JHNQG
* The Emperors Handbook - http://amzn.com/0743233832
* The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future - http://amzn.com/0393088693
* Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work - http://amzn.com/B009JU6UPG
* Chaos: Making a New Science - http://amzn.com/0143113453
* Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing - http://amzn.com/0262019388
On subject, I really enjoyed The Emperor's Handbook, and would definitely recommend it.
I do this for two reasons:
1. It's fun.
2. In fiction authors have the liberty to go dip shit crazy with their possibilities. They can even change the inertia of the universe they are in.
I also think reading this kind of books helps to think outside the box and often helps to get a fresh view on problems I'm working on.
It also helps me relax my mind while reading, which I feel is a prerequisite for it to work properly.
PS: here are some of the works I particularly enjoyed lately:
Howey, Hugh.: Wool (and the entire Silo saga, very good read); Sanderson, Brandon: Mistborn: The Final Empire and the sequels (Sanderson is a genius when it comes to creating consistent universes); Phillips, Richard: The second ship (trilogy, contemporary argumented with alien technology); Corey, James S. A.: Leviathan Awakes (expanse series)
"Bill, you are really inspiring me to increase my concern for the critical issues of economy and technology. You are a gift to the world. thank u."
Wow, Gates has really cleaned up his public perception.
What Gates has done that's unique is to pressure/induce other super-wealthy individuals to also donate their wealth to charity.
Rather, he's being measured as the most significant philanthropist, because his underlying belief systems, is so all encompassing:
From: [1]
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.
[1] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...
I almost drove off the road listening to him talking about bonds vs stocks and percentages. It was interesting, but definitely not a road trip book.
That said, I finished Snow Crash on the trip, and it was a great book. I think I preferred Cryptonomicon a bit more, but some of the theories in Snow Crash were incredible, and way before their time. Hiro Protagonist and YT are also awesome characters.
(I'm mostly kidding, I enjoyed it, but some parts do go on)
Edit: Jack Shaftoe is probably my favourite fictional character: King of the Vagabonds, L'Emmerdeur, Half-Cocked Jack, Quicksilver, Ali Zaybak, Sword of Divine Fire, and Jack the Coiner....
The namshubs from Snow Crash are pretty heavily inspired by ideas from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's a very interesting book. Richard Dawkins said of it "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."
http://www.amazon.com/Tap-Dancing-Work-Practically-Everythin...
Who owns the future - Jaron Lanier
Canoeing the Congo - Phil Harwood
Margaret Thatcher - The Authorized Biography
Venture Deals - Brad Feld / Jason Mendelson
1000 Ultimate Experiences - Lonely Planet
we are collecting lists of influential peoples favorite stuff
we have warren buffett, bill gates, elon musk, heaps more
The Wide Lens - Ron Adner (a more complete view for developing projects, foreseeing the inevitable problems beyond your immediate reach)
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami (just awesome)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (tomorrow's world, written the day before yesterday)
And here's all the 40-something book I've read this year: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/562634
Can any technical-types here explain if they found it particularly impressive? It's well written but I didn't think it very notable. Do I need to read it with a specific mindset?
Had he been offed in the war the U.S., at least, would be a much more optimistic and forward thinking place.
- Jules Michelet, History of France (pg suggested somewhere to read books about history. I now fully agree, it is a way to get the best possible understanding of today's world. As much as we have to understand how a cell has grown from nothing to its current state to really understand what it is, we also have to understand how a country has been built in the long history to understand it's current issues)
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (read it again).
(I say this as a philosophy degree-holding liberal pinko who is is exasperated by Gladwell. To be fair, I'm more exasperated with the culture of cherry-picking near-banalities wrapped in an engaging narrative that he and the TED folks have propagated rather than their work itself.)
Sounds like you're complaining about style over substance... I suppose I'd find it annoying as well.
2. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers [ http://amzn.to/1kFszdH ] - great book on stress and its effects by Robert Sapolsky (have you seen his lectures on behavioural biology? Fascinating stuff, even if you always thought 'meh, biology' - the guy is an amazing lecturer)
Masala:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala_(film_genre)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56966.The_Navigator
http://www.amazon.com/The-Navigator-Morris-L-West/dp/0688030...
Non-fiction, agreed. Especially Biographies of successful people who made it from the scratch after a lot of struggling, like Mr. Gates himself.
Wait. Is he saying that sometimes he does choose what's on the bestseller list?
Is that a problem for you? Does it make your hipster friends angry?
Let's see what I read from the bestseller's list this year, off the top of my head: Quiet, Thinking Fast and Slow, Devil in the White City, Steve Jobs, and yes, 1 or 2 of the Game of Thrones books. I also read The Corrections, which wasn't on the best-seller list this year, but was definitely hyped in its day (Oprah Book Club! How mainstream!)
In fact, I make an effort to read the bestsellers lists for ideas. It makes me more well-read, not less.
Malcolm Gladwell may be too popular to be 'cool', but he's a master storyteller. Haters gonna hate.
Malcolm Gladwell, who has said in an interview[1] that he writes to try out ideas, is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. Any reader of a Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book Outliers) can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks, but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-provoking assembly.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html
"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?
"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."
But, apparently the HN crowd only reads Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Hemingway.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
This link responds to a lot of new stories (and not a few comments) that are posted on Hacker News each day.