9 must read non-fiction books for autumn-winter
“The known is finite, the unknown infinite”
It’s the time of year when things in books get serious with chunky histories and political debates on the page. It’s also the season for spooky supernatural investigations and celebrity memoirs, though, so we can have it all.
If you’re still recovering from your summer comedown and fighting ‘fuck the future’ despondency on a day-to-day basis just remember — if you’re reading anything at this point, you’re basically in the resistance.
1. End Times Fascism (Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor)
If you read one non-fiction book this year, make it Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism. Like Klein’s earlier books, on themes like disaster capitalism, it’s one of those arguments that offers a clear-eyed throughline to chaotic, unstable news and events, making everything make a bit more sense. It’s also a portal into how the next 10-50 years on this planet could go. The central thesis is that right-wing politicians, religious zealots, AI tech bros and impunity-seeking millionaires and billionaires are all trying to construct ‘bunkers’ against the coming apocalypse whilst causing, speeding up or profiting from said apocalypses.
These can range from the celestial bunkers of the Rapture and nation states with locked-down borders to actual, legit underground bunkers/islands/seasteads for law-hating, ultra-wealthy preppers. Klein and artist-writer-activist Taylor join the dots between climate emergency, the third temple of Jerusalem, Anthropic’s clash with the US military, private rocket ships, Tommy Robinson and, of course, Elon Musk. They also devote a good 100-page chunk to hope, in the form of Minneapolis’ community fight-back against ICE invasion and terror, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign of people and place-based NYC love, the Venetian response to Jeff Bezos’ wedding and data center resistance around the world. All based on staying, preserving and sharing rather than extracting, destroying and leaving, as the authors stress. Essential.
2. Sleeping Beauties (David Byrne)
What an absolute TOME of curiosity and ideas this is. The musician, Talking Heads frontman and all-round eccentric David Byrne has written one of our favourite books of the year - a deep dive into his obsession with “sleeping beauties” or good ideas that have gone dormant and “how they wake up”. This is rigorous while being delightfully idiosyncratic, cross-disciplinary but also focused on his aims: to look at the forces which have led to important rediscoveries in art, literature, science, economics etcetera and to propose guidelines around what to look for next.
So we get Byrne on Vermeer, Bach, Caspar David Friedrich and The Great Gatsby. The intrinsic qualities and innovations of the work, what stood in the way of contemporary or later appreciation and what changed, be it individual champions, catastrophes, tech or cultural shifts. We also get Byrne on the atom, lichen, instability and irrational behaviour in financial markets and solar panels (his only entry in the ‘economics’ section of the book - he’s David Byrne, he can do whatever he wants). He opens with his own unearthing of the experimental Brazilian musician Tom Zé in the late 80s and touches on the revival of the black Renaissance composer Vicente Lusitano. We’d rather like a Volume 2 with more of Byrne’s own gems, particularly from women and non-white artists and thinkers. Here, these are threaded throughout discussions of major figures which might feel inevitable geniuses now but weren’t always so.
3. Letters To Our Sons (Stephen Graham, Orly Klein)
National Treasure Stephen Graham has just put out this beaut book project, inspired by his co-editor, psychologist Orly Klein’s appeal to her male friends to write letters of advice to her teenage son. Publisher Bloomsbury opened up an online portal - and went out to places like libraries and prisons - to find letters from as wide a range of fathers as possible. The resulting collection is profound and funny and an important intervention in the current crisis of young masculinity. If Adolescence (which Graham co-created, co-wrote and starred in) started the conversation, Letters To Our Sons continues it, in gentle, patient, inclusive ways.
Graham hopes the book will end up in bathrooms and dentist waiting rooms, for boys and young men to stumble upon. You can dip in and out of Letters.. or immerse yourself in one of the three sections (early years, adolescence and adulthood) with everything from self-deprecating contributions from famous names to anonymous confessions, complete with the original spelling, slang and grammar. Riz Ahmed is sweet and calm, Javier Bardem gets philosophical, Danny Dyer is “so proud you came from my nuts”. There are many letters addressed to ‘mate’, ‘my boys’, ‘big man’ and ‘little man’. Real heart-warming stuff.
4. The Steps (Sylvester Stallone)
Duh, duh, duhnnn! Duh, DUH, duhnnnn! For the 50th anniversary celebrations of everyone’s favourite boxing movie, we’d suggest skipping I Play Rocky and reading Sly’s memoir instead. The crowd-pleasing film’s fi-ine but not a patch on the sheer heart and courage you get first-hand in The Steps. We think of Rocky as a franchise now, as a hit, sure, maybe as a fun, populist Oscar winner but the story of how Stallone wrote it and fought to star in it is so personal and unique. And genuinely very fucking inspiring.
The writing is simple, affecting and honest. Yeah, he was drinking raw eggs (like Rocky) and looking like a ‘bum’ (like Rocky) because he was broke, living off no money in New York City and trying to Make It as an actor. Yeah, he had to sell his dog for like $40 and later bought him back. He was writing scripts about Edgar Allen Poe and working-class people in a grim boarding house. It’s all the more romantic and heroic for the fact that it’s basically impossible to replicate nowadays. Stallone, then and now, is preoccupied with persistence but also regular people trying to find dignity and respect in the world. The thrilling, fist-in-the-air negotiations with the studio alone are high, high drama. Not your ten-a-penny actor’s memoir.
5. Power And The People (Arthur Downing)
More Autumn Non-Fiction Reads
- Blockers - Michael Lewis (out now)
- Anti-Fascist Economics - Isabella Weber (out now)
- The Great Dictator - Matthew Sweet (out now)
- Across The Universe - Steve Taylor (out now)
- Battle Axe - Margaret Hodge (out now)
- Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David - Blake J. Harris (out 22nd Oct)
- The Last Best Place on The Internet - Richard Cooke (out 6th Nov)
In Power And The People, Arthur Downing is described as a strategy director at “an energy company” (Octopus) and visiting senior fellow at LSE. At the time of writing, he cheekily admits that writing his history of British energy, which is critical of successive recent governments, major industry players and independent regulators, probably won’t help his career much. Well, as of this month, he’s a principal policy advisor to DESNZ, following a secondment there - we love to see it. The book is a much needed reframing towards the political economy and crucially, ownership of our energy networks, transmission, distribution and retail rather than simply innovations in tech and science. There’s plenty of that, too, but experts have been shouting for a while that we have all the solutions — we just need to build them.
It’s also a fascinating look back at turn-of-the-century municipal energy, the creation and implementation of the National Grid, the model of the Central Electricity Generating Board, the dash for gas and the catastrophic ‘zombie privatisation’ of the 2010s. We all know about Thatcher’s sell-offs but the last of those is especially maddening (see wasted carbon capture investments and paying wind farms to turn off.) Well-researched, engaging and at times revelatory - mostly around what early/mid 20th century Tories got on board with! Downing convincingly argues for a decentralised system organised around public ownership. The vibes are very much: we can do it because... we did it.
6. Writing The Real (Dan Coxon, Richard V. Hirst)
Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst’s anthology of essays for Dead Ink Books is a must for anyone interested in writing non-fiction and memoir or even just learning more about how this work is constructed.
With a beautiful mix of disciplines and parts of the country represented, Writing The Real offers stories, tips and criticism galore - even a couple of actual lists. There’s familiar names like Kit de Waal and Nikesh Shukla (on political writing). Tom Lee exploring writing illness is eye-opening and we get wonderful, sensitive essays on Virginia Woolf, Michel de Montaigne and W.G. Sebald’s relationship to landscape. Shout out also to Kristie de Garis who brings a refreshing perspective to class, chronic illness and nature, that is working in nature as opposed to conquering or contemplating it. Warning: you will finish this book with a *stacked* list of further reading.
7. The Castle (Jon Ronson)
Jon Ronson’s latest book achieves a magnificent sleight of hand that we half-hate to even spell out here. The Castle’s superpower is that it appears to be simply the latest outlandish tale that Ronson has got his teeth into: “the guy who wrote The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare At Goats has got a new one out about a weird castle” you could say perfectly innocently as you press this book into the hands of a man you’re worried about.
In fact, as well as being about a castle owner trying to recreate the Playboy Mansion - which it is - Ronson also gives us a whole selection of stories about men in retreat, in crisis and in despair. He’s putting meat on the bones of grim statistics around employment, relationships, drugs, suicide, gender, purposelessness and life expectancy in the West. No lecturing, no talking down, no super-clear-cut case studies, just conversations and his own musings about how to come unstuck.
8. The Breaking of The English Working Class (Jonas Patrick Marvin)
This slim volume from Verso Books and Salvage is a short, sharp primer on the various dividing lines enforced on the working classes over decades, by far-right race politics, the loss of social and community spaces, not to mention segmentations between renters vs homeowners and North vs South. There’s a nice chapter on Marvin’s adopted home of Stoke-on-Trent to situate the arguments - its challenges and arts projects, the threat of Reform, the monkey dust, the “warm cuddle” of living there.
Written before Burnham took power, Marvin is a contributor to Novara Media so we expect he’ll have more to say in the coming years. Here, he digs into the psychological wages of both whiteness and the promise of cosmopolitan cities with a rare clarity, addresses gentrification and the housing crisis and offers a new, expansive version of the working classes by the close.
9. Worlds of Fear and Wonder (Malcolm Gaskill)
Ghosts, witches, vampires, yes but also ambitious alchemists, levitating saints and ventriloquist dummies. There’s just so much lore and life in Malcolm Gaskill’s richly drawn collection of essays on ‘the supernatural, past and present’. The origin of the phrase hocus pocus. A Catholic reliquary in a new world pilgrim’s grave. Kepler’s defence of his elderly mother. Lines of Emily Dickinson on witchcraft and hauntings. And an Ealing Studios post-war horror anthology film.
Gaskill is emeritus professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia, having previously written bestseller The Ruin of All Witches. In World of Fear and Wonder he uses the history of emotions to delve into the relationships between superstition and science; fantasy and reality; feeling and thinking and, of course, then and now. A mind-expanding treat for spooky season.
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