i'm hoping this turns into a non-fiction recs thread, because i need something in the vein of chuck klosterman or malcolm gladwell or david sedaris asap.
Not sure if these will work for you, but I'm in the middle of Just Kids by Patti Smith and it's really interesting. I also highly recommend The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee, Running the Books by Avi Steinberg, Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky, 4,000 Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison by Warren Fellows (this one's on the gruesome side at times), and if you enjoy history Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo and two books on the Cocoanut Grove fire: Holocaust! by Benzaquin (older, but has some interesting details) and Fire in the Grove by Esposito.
I know these are super-specific, but if you're into movies at all, Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is a great book about the New Hollywood movement in the 70's. I also love Amos Vogel's "Film As A Subversive Art", and Francois Truffaut's interview series with Alfred Hitchcock, "Mr Hitchcock, How Did You Do This?" (I hope that's the title, I translated it from German. XD)
Last year I read Peter Doggett's "You Never Give Me Your Money", a no-nonsense retelling of the Beatles' break-up, and I loved it. But I love that kind of behind-the-scenes-stuff, anyway.
It's not necessarily out of preference, but yeah, 90% of my reading list is nonfiction, and the only fiction that's on there is because someone else recommended it to me, not because I particularly thought it looked interesting on my own.
Yeah, it seems to me personally that the vast, VAST majority of Adult Novels out there are just so deadly serious and depressing and preoccupied with being middle-aged that most of them are totally unrelatable to anyone who a) is under 40 and b) prefers to occasionally find a bit of cheer or even optimism in their reading, rather than a grim grind of misery. I tend to read more YA too, and when I do read books meant for adults they overwhelmingly tend to be either nonfiction or fantasy novels. And holy crap am I ever sick of encountering marital/relationship infidelity, especially when you're supposed to apparently be all sympathetic with the character doing it.
I love YA and children's literature too, but if you think all adult oriented lit is about being middle-aged, I don't think you're reading enough of those.
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My preference is for social research, especially studies that include accounts from the people being studied.
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What do you like reading? For me it's history :)
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I know these are super-specific, but if you're into movies at all, Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is a great book about the New Hollywood movement in the 70's. I also love Amos Vogel's "Film As A Subversive Art", and Francois Truffaut's interview series with Alfred Hitchcock, "Mr Hitchcock, How Did You Do This?" (I hope that's the title, I translated it from German. XD)
Last year I read Peter Doggett's "You Never Give Me Your Money", a no-nonsense retelling of the Beatles' break-up, and I loved it. But I love that kind of behind-the-scenes-stuff, anyway.
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