Books like A Matter of Taste

I love this book because it is the handbook of messaging that is purposeful.

It made me a better communicator by teaching me the importance of building a strong, consistent story about who you are and what you want.

Also, this book sharpened my own ability to create messages people remember, to be able to help others do the same. I love how clearly it lays out what makes a story unforgettable. It pushed me to be intentional about the words I choose and how I deliver them, something I use every single day in my work. 

Malcolm Gladwell never disappoints me. He has said that when people meet him, they treat him like they know him. After years of reading his books and listening to his podcasts, his voice sounds like a friend's.

This book is one of my favorites because it gives me hope that with the right ingredients of passion, hard work, and opportunity, our efforts will tip toward success. It reminds me to open my eyes and watch for opportunities so that when we are in the business of passionate service, we may end up on a great adventure that we could not have predicted.

Many of the books by Seth Godin are amazing, but this is a personal favorite.

Great ideas aren't just ideas; they're like viruses. They spread from person to person in powerful, unexpected ways. The book explores this idea and talks about some of the factors that lead ideas to spread and some of the consequences of their diffusion.

The world is full of great ideas that don’t catch on. Indoor plumbing, for example, took about 2,500 years to become popular. Others, like radio, catch fire seemingly overnight. Why? Rogers produced the seminal work on this topic, which has now gone through five editions of updates.

He sets out clear patterns of how innovations get taken up—or struggle to. He delves into many examples to prove his points, and he always makes the reader think. Before you focus on your wonderful idea, think about what will make the idea be accepted quickly by the marketplace. As Rogers shows, that will save you vast amounts of work down the road.

I love how this book takes a protagonist steeped in noir tropes and drops him into a shattered world that doesn’t seem to understand him. He’s a trench coat and a fedora in a ruined sci-fi world of technology and crime. This isn’t the deepest read on the list, but it’s a ton of fun and does some interesting things to subvert the sci-fi noir tropes.

This book is a must read for everyone because it covers all major sociologist’s work and theories in a very simple and concise manner.

How sociology was born, and thinkers have presented their theory based on the social structure in their era. The cross references of different theories by different thinkers help in self-analysis. The classical and contemporary sociological theory is very well explained.

This is a good book to start with for understanding the history of sociology and how different thinkers made a change in the society in their time.

I have an intellectual crush on Pierre Bourdieu. He has a sexy mind. Unfortunately, he passed away just as I was getting to know his work, back in 2002. Bourdieu wrote a mind-boggling number of books, but I have chosen this one as a good introduction for people who’d like to get to know his work. Practical Reason is actually made up of a series of lectures, all written relatively late in his career. They do quite a good job of accessibly summarizing his key ideas. Bourdieu supported the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and was a vociferous critic of neoliberalism. Bourdieu’s work helps to explain how inequality is recreated across generations, and why dominant interests tend to shape the trajectory of the state. 

As I said, sociology can be filled with inscrutable jargon, but there are still classic theory books that I recommend.

Ok, it pays to have taken some sociology classes, but the following two books are important: Robert K. Merton’s Social Theory and Social Structure with its twin essays: the bearing of social theory on research and the bearing of research on social theory.

But despite Merton’s elegant theorizing, he was a genius at coining phrases that have entered out language: anomie, bureaucratic structure, reference groups, the self-fulfilling prophecy, and my favorite, actually taken from the Bible—the Mathew Effect, those who have will have more and those who don’t have will have less; meaning if you get a lot of honors, you’ll get more honors; if you have a lot of money, you’ll get more money and the poor people on the bottom will get few honors and money and will… show more.

This book presents an alternative history of sociological theory. Sociological theory is usually seen as either emerging from the British and French philosophers of the 18th century or from the writings in the 19th century of Auguste Comte, generally considered to be the “father of sociology.” Beginning with the 12th century Scholastics, the influence of Christianity on science and social theory is discussed, and its influence is carried through today.

This book is so important to me because it represented the first time in print that I had declared I was a practicing Christian, something that is usually not done in sociology, which is one of the most, if not the most, secular of all the social sciences.

Theresa Earenfight is a renowned queenship scholar whose ideas about queens and queenship inspired me when I was a graduate student and continue to excite me today. This is a book that I recommend to my own students as the perfect place to start with medieval queenship. Earenfight’s book moves chronologically across the Middle Ages, drawing together examples of queens from all across Europe to illustrate key ideas about queenship and demonstrate how different women exercised the queen’s office. An engaging read which is underpinned by years of research and deep expertise in the field.