Non-Fiction Books Everyone Should Read
Fans of beautifully presented information will be thrilled to learn that Knowledge is Beautiful, David McCandless‘s follow up to the bestselling Information is Beautiful, is out this week. To celebrate he’s shared this amazing infographic on the non-fiction books everyone should read.
So many books. So many polls, charts and top tens. The inspiration for this graphic was a distinctly contemporary feeling. The sensation of snowblindedness amid a blizzard of information. How do I chose a great non-fiction book to read? Have I missed any classics in my reading life? Do any of these charts and polls actually agree?
I felt a ‘meta-chart’ of all the top-rated tomes might be useful. The process was pretty simple: isolate the leading charts and prizes, cross-compare and see what they agreed on.
Over 40 lists were reviewed, from a mix of sources: newspaper, prize, contemporary online & classic lists. After necessary whittling, the selection was boiled down to the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Time, National Review, plus the post-war winners of the Pulitzer Prize and a smattering of folksy online sources: goodreads.com,askmetafilter.com and librarything.com.
The analysis and result is what you see before you: a consensus-cloud of the Non-Fiction Books Everyone Should Read. Word-clouds work elegantly for this kind of data. They also resonate with the literary theme. We used the logos from the book jackets to give each title a bit of character.
This image is actually the ‘sequel’ to the (Fiction) Books Everyone Should Read visualisation from my previous book, Information is Beautiful.
Stand them side by side, I recommend and see ask, how many have you read? (Me? 12%).
