10 mind-expanding non-fiction books for Spring
We’re journeying from the bottom of a pint glass to the edge of space-time...
This season’s non-fiction sweep is so rich and varied it could easily be plugged into Portlandia’s iconic ‘Did You Read It?’ sketch. You know, the one where Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein rapidly trade magazine article subjects back and forth.
'Did you read that thing about how artists through history paid the bills?' 'Of course. But did you read that thing about the Gen Z girls who got into metal detecting?' 'I did read that.' 'Did you read John Robins memoir.. (Yes)' 'Did you read Patrick Radden Keefe on.. (Yes)' Did you read.. Did you read.. Did you read...?
Shortlist Pick: Thirst (John Robins)
Most comedian’s books simply do not need to exist. OK they’re funny enough but it’s usually some glossed over origin story, a few lists of sketches or stand-up that never made it to air and a smattering of ultimately disappointing anecdotes about other famous people. Thirst feels like a book that needs to exist: for John Robins and for its readers. One half of Radio 5Live’s Elis & John show (with Elis James. Robins also presents a podcast named How Do You Cope?), he has structured this book around twelve drinks that changed his life, from a stubby at Scouts camp through to Wood’s Old Navy Rum and White Russians. Mostly because he’s a recovering alcoholic.
Robins is, sensibly, writing about some of the lowest points in his life from the scar not the wound but his honesty together with his ability to laugh at himself is infectious and inspiring. No, it’s not all funny. The sheer detail and intensity he brings to the recollections of his nirvana-like pub visits, his crying-on-the-toilet days and the small wins and fails in-between is quite something, though. Not to mention he’s quoting bloody Philip Larkin, Neko Case and Simone Weil throughout. Robins generously and unabashedly throws every mantra, wise word and toolkit that’s ever helped him into Thirst. If you’re currently addicted to something, this might just unlock part of it - surely the best use of a funnyman there is.
The Edge of Space-Time (Chanda Prescod-Weinstein)
Don’t let the main title of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time spook you: the subtitle is the delightful ‘Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie’. And, in fact, the whole point of her book is to bring curious non-scientists into the big questions we still have about the universe. An associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, Prescod-Weinstein researches dark matter, the Big Bang and neutron stars in addition to Black feminist science studies.
Here, as she dives into gravity, relativity, electromagnetism, cosmic boundaries, event horizons and quantum field theory, she tells readers not to worry if things feel fuzzy, dropping in silly-to-complex diagrams and her own, inclusive, personal real-world experiences. Prescod-Weinstein’s project requires deploying all sorts of literary, cinematic and pop culture references in order to expand the metaphors we use when we think about space and physics. From ones you might expect - Christopher Nolan movies, Trekkies are well-served - to ones you might not: Drake vs Kendrick, Missy Elliott, Sun Ra, even the Electric Slide. Jordan Peele’s Us helps with gravitational lensing, Alice in Wonderland with the stretching of space-time. Imagination-expanding and utterly unique.
What The Bouncer Saw (George Bass)
You’ve never read a memoir like this before. Within about the first ten pages, security guard George Bass has told us his hourly wage and the exact amount, down to the pence, of his latest water bill. So refreshing and so true to the running internal monologue of millions of people. What The Bouncer Saw colours in the lines of the years long cost-of-living crisis, letting us feel the tension and stress over food prices, mortgage rises and energy bills day after day. A rare takeaway coffee is half an hour’s wages, the small Christmas bonus will go to the dentist...
As Bass does campus security for Canterbury University, we also get a term’s worth of student stories that are wild, funny and heart-breaking - if you’ve ever lived in halls, you’ll recognise the fights, fire alarms and wayward guests - and Bass lets us in on his own tales of sex, drugs and techno from his teen and twentysomething days. As he and his longterm partner Jess try to stay afloat and stay joyful with their daughter Rose, we see how his watchful security mindset creeps in to his home life. One genuinely shocking element: just how much university guards are now called on to cover, whether that’s parking duties, gritting, cleaning, frontline mental health support, dealing with endless Amazon and food deliveries. Remarkable.
Cosmic Music: The Life of Alice Coltrane (Andy Beta)
From White Rabbit Books, Andy Beta’s biography of Alice Coltrane is pretty special. One-of-one doesn’t quite do her justice: musician, composer, bandleader, harpist, pianist, guru… This book is one to cancel all your plans and really sink into, rich and textured as it is with many decades’ worth of stories and reflections on making music and finding transcendence. Beta weaves Alice’s story into an oral history of 20th century jazz legends, from the clubs of ‘Motor City’ Detroit and Paris to the famous sessions and performances in New York City and Long Island, where two geniuses - Alice and John Coltrane - made house.
Journey in Satchidanada, Alice Coltrane’s fourth album, has become an undeniable touchstone in the recent and much overdue re-evaluation of her place in music history. Yet there’s so much more “cosmic music” to dig into, spiritual jazz and beyond, in her own discography and in the John Coltrane records made during their time together. Alice Coltrane lived many lives, culminating in her leading an ashram in the hills of California, and this book is devoted to understanding and celebrating all of them.
If We Tolerate This (Daniel Trilling)
If We Tolerate This is a short, sharp look at how we got here, here being Reform consistently on over 25% in the polls and worryingly successful in the locals. It’s from Daniel Trilling, who writes for the LRB, The Guardian and the New York Times. And, sure, we open with a survey of the “fanatics” - Farage, Yaxley-Lennon, Musk et al and their emotive allure - but Trilling swiftly and wisely moves on to analyse two other distinct groups within Britain’s establishment: the Tory “opportunists” - most notably Johnson and then Sunak - and the Labour “cowards” in Starmer’s government. He argues that they have made the far-right “respectable” through mimicking hateful rhetoric, copying hard-line policies and failing to be honest with the public about immigration.
Alongside this central thesis, Trilling alights on many interesting nuggets and questions: for instance, who most represents the working class between MPs Lee Anderson and Hannah Spencer? Are we loyal to a system in which Reform only needs to get to that “magical 32%” of the electorate to gain power? How can we combat Ben Goldsmith’s nature-loving eco-fascism? And should we start preparing the bulwark for Danny Kruger’s plans to directly appoint judges and push laws through without parliamentary votes?
A People’s History of Football (Mickaël Correia, Jean-Christophe Deveney, et al.)
From Pluto Press, A People’s History of Football is a labour of love that spins football on its head(er). First written by Mickaël Correia and Jean-Christophe Deveney in French and gorgeously illustrated by Italian comic artist Lelio Bonaccorso, the English edition of this graphic novel has been translated by Fionn Petch. As we flit from medieval English folk football to the pan-African championships. Bonaccorso, who has worked with Marvel and DC, gives each chapter its own distinct colour palette, with sepia tones for the older sections: we always know if we’re in Stalinist Russia or ‘70s Brazil. The throughline to the stories? The people, the fans, the players, the streets.
And the stories are truly incredible, including the Austrian player who defied the Nazis their propaganda match win to the Russian brothers who ended up in the gulag for beating official police teams. And did you know which player first started dribbling with the ball and why? Or just how big women’s football was in the 1920s? A wonderful gift for anyone who’s about to become obsessed with this summer’s World Cup.
London Falling (Patrick Radden Keefe)
If you read non-fiction, you’ll know the work of Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. London Falling is his propulsive, meticulous account of the mysterious death of nineteen year-old Zac Brettler. In 2019 Zac, who had been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, fell to his death from a block of luxury apartments overlooking the Thames. This tragedy for his family then transformed into a maze of confusion, contradictory stories, London underworld figures and police force failures as they tried to find the explanations behind Zac’s death.
The book illuminates some shockingly murky depths of the city that might shift your opinion of the capital - we’ve all heard stories about crooks, con men, ghost flats and shell companies but this narrative makes it all real and unavoidable. It explores the links between dirty money, criminal activity, Russian oligarchs and the glossy lives of their families, with keen insights into why we might lie at different points of a life. Keefe’s reporting gets closer to important answers in the mystery but he never forgets that he’s telling the sad story of one young man who found himself in circumstances he couldn’t control.
Things We Found In The Ground (Eleanor Bruce, Lucilla Gray)
It doesn’t get much more wholesome than this. Ellie and Lucie are two cousins and Gen Z ‘detectorists’ who, stuck with family in Lincolnshire during the pandemic, caught the metal detecting bug hard and eventually set up their @romanfound Instagram account to document their finds. Their tales of trudging through fields, bogs and up stormy hills in search of coins, badges and all manner of jewellery, toys and accessories from throughout history, including yes some Roman denarii, are lovely to escape into. Even when they’re soaked through and only picking up disappointing Coke ‘can slaw’, bits of lead and shotgun shells.
This is a conversational, welcoming and charming joint memoir that introduces the subculture, the gear and the camaraderie and competition of group digs to new audiences. Plus, of course, the terminology and tactics - from beep deciphering and ‘gridding’ to the official definition of ‘treasure’. Things We Found.. also serves as a way in to histories of both the county and coinage, currency and monarchs, touching on religion, trade, war, fashions and plagues. The most heart-warming bit? The ways Ellie and Lucie’s hobby leads to encounters with locals of all ages, including birdwatchers, artefact sorters, the ‘lady of the manor’ who gives them permission to dig her land and bakers of excellent cakes.
Making Art and Making A Living (Mason Currey)
Cereal, bread, ice cream, tinned fish. Just some of the appetising, low-cost, low-effort diets of artists, writers and musicians struggling to get by on art alone. Mason Currey, who put out the brilliant book Daily Rituals in 2013 and writes the newsletter Subtle Manoeuvres, returns to the lives of artists through history, this time focusing on how they paid the bills. Inspiring and with a strong point of view - in the sense that we can perhaps learn something from this moany, stubborn, alternative lot - Currey gives us a sense of the combination of luck, circumstance and individual choice which dictated how names including Joyce, Kafka, Van Gogh and Woolf spent their time and money.
Making Art.. is full of amusing and consoling anecdotes, diary entries and letters from artists asking friends and family for money. There’s a great chapter on FDR’s Federal Art Program in the ‘30s and early ‘40s and at one point Currey compares poet Alexander Pope’s Homeric translation subscription service to Substack writers today. Haydn’s prince-pleasing, Godard’s compulsive stealing, John Cage’s game show winnings, even Pessoa blowing his inheritance — this isn’t exactly advice as such but it certainly shows how many ways there are to (just about) make a creative life.
The Age of Alchemy (Kit Chapman)
This romp through the history of alchemy takes as its focal point how the traditions and writings of craftsmen, physicians, charlatans, ‘professors of secrets’ and other early innovators shaped modern chemistry. The author Kit Chapman is a lecturer at Falmouth University, who you might know from his 2019 book Superheavy, on the race to make elements with atomic numbers over 100 with particle accelerators. Here, he’s more concerned with ideas around the transmutation of base metals into gold, the search for immortality through the Philosopher’s Stone, the four humours, questionable potions and lotions and the Mercury-Sulfur theory.
This is an accessible book that’s stacked with intriguing asides - like the esoteric chemistry Easter Egg in the Baldur’s Gate game series - and characters’ stories you’ll want to explore further, like Mary ‘the Jewess’, Paracelsus, Ibn Sina and Jabir from the Islamic Golden Age and Pope Clement VII, who did proto-clinical trials of posions and antidotes on prisoners. Chapman argues that the emperor Diocletian inadvertently made alchemy into the mysterious dark art when he ransacked the workshops of Alexandria, leaving only scraps of ‘recipes’ behind. He also reinstates a number of overlooked - or simply unlucky - early chemists who prioritised experiments, process and sharing knowledge over hidden tricks and magical thinking. Fascinating stuff.
Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!
