Ask HN: What are your favorite non-fiction books of all time?

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins

Freedom from the Known - Jiddu

For decades I've been plagued by 'what is one supposed to do in life' question, I've been restless for years.

These two books gave me atleast a logical framework to understand my frustrations.

For me the comparison of gene and meme blew me away. In short: There are not one but two things in you yearning/working to be reproduced: your genes (not body) and your memes/meme complexes. Thosr memes that are not good at getting reproduced die out, just like for genes.

The book is now around 40 years old but still stunning in its insightfulness.

Upvoted, and I would also say the Book of Mormon, with the Bible. The BoM reinforces the Bible's teachings powerfully, and as I age and read again, sometimes in other languages, and some scholarly things about it, they both just keep getting better and better. Including in their effect on me. You can get a copy of either one for free.

Edit: Additionally, some which have been mentioned or not:

- a couple of biographies of Lincoln (one is free on gutenberg.org, the other more recent by Doris Kearns Goodwin), and one of Washington whose name I forget now, but there are good ones out there.

- the 7 Habits book (Covey), and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie.

- Refactoring ..., by Martin Fowler.

- some thick Scheme programming book from college (sorry, it's downstairs). And "The Little Schemer", also about Scheme (one of the authors, Friedman, was also our instructor).

- Since Cumorah, by Hugh Nibley (maybe dated now, but there is a lot of related work). Really got me interested in related topics.

I would love to hear more commentary on Bostrom. From the parts I've heard (in podcasts - still haven't read the book), it is a lot of talking about technology that is nowhere near where we are today, and thus (to me), a waste of time. But I am open to being convinced otherwise...

All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter.

Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand - how males and females talk different languages.

Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. Philosophy In The Flesh is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from.

Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc

Plutarch's Lives - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed.

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. The Importance of Living - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life.

Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind.

Susan Faludi, STIFFED - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion - media, war, propaganda, democracy

Noam Chomsky's political books

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful - the world, development, government, planning, organization, humanity, sustainability

J.R. Saul, Voltaire's Bastards - power, history, democracy, technocracy, reason, rationality, history from late 18th C until today.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 - the anti-industrialist tradition, politics, culture, society and the new language describing these things

Clifford Pickover, Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty - programming, mathematics, art, fractals, dynamical systems etc

Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility - hard to explain, kind of advanced self-help, the magic of changing attitudes, expectations, habits.

My favourite non-fiction books of all time, though, are the essays of Emerson, Hazlitt, RL Stevenson, GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell. And the books of Nietzsche, SARK and Robert Fulghum.