Books like Because Internet

I love animals, so I was fascinated to learn from this book that some of my favorites are considered pests by others. In this book, Bethany Brookshire talks to experts who study rats, mice, bears, pigeons, and many other animals.

It's especially interesting to see the same animals from different points of view: elephants are amazing to people who live far away from them but quite annoying to farmers who need to protect their crops from these large, destructive creatures.

In other chapters, we meet biologists who study bears, deer, or cane toads to help manage the way people and animals continue to coexist. The book made me look at animals in a new way, but I still love them.

I enjoyed reading about Gary Marcus's journey of learning guitar because I know what it's like to try to master an instrument. I didn't know, at least not back when I was taking violin lessons, that neuroscientists have been studying what happens in our brains when we learn to play music.

Marcus is a neuroscientist, so he followed his musical progress through a scientific lens and created this entertaining and educational book about the science of music. 

All scientists are different, and this book brings that home in a very fun way. It's on the shelf with art coffee table books in my house because that's essentially what it is. The book collects photos of science tattoos and descriptions of the science behind the tattoos.

Some are small, simple line drawings of molecules; others are colorful sleeves or back tattoos with intricate scenes of plants, animals, or famous textbook images. As a science writer, I meet a lot of scientists and people who love (and live) science, and this book has had me keeping an eye out for DNA molecules and other science tattoos. 

This next book takes a historical approach and explores what Shakespeare would likely have known about science in his lifetime and how that shows up in his works. If the premise sounds contrived, don't worry: the book emphasizes many ongoing debates about connections between Shakespeare and scientists of his era.

I particularly enjoyed learning about the Shakespeare Scholars' Conference and how different it was from the science conferences I knew! Overall, the book taught me much about 16th-century astronomy and Shakespeare. As a student, I would have loved this and always felt I had to choose between science and literature.

This writing instruction book came to my aid as I began to teach writing at Harvard University in the late 1990s, when I was trying to help college students cultivate their own voice as writers.

The title was brilliant, surprising the reader that the subject was revision and not writing, per se. This focused on a fundamental truth, which is that good writing – whether it be fiction or non-fiction, artistic or professional – almost always goes through several revisions. Students often recoil at the idea of revisions because they threaten to burden them with more work.

What Murray underlined (and a point I’ve reiterated) is that revisions provide the opportunity to improve your work. The more that writers are comfortable with making revisions, the easier it will be to cultivate and improve their voices in their written work.

The Oxford (and, later, Cambridge) literature scholar looks out at the shifting cultural landscape of post-war Britain in the late 1940s and prophesies the postmodern future we now inhabit. It is one of Lewis’s lesser-known volumes (he is the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and bestselling religious books such as Mere Christianity) and one of the shortest.

But this book packs a powerful punch that I have used in teaching law students about our culture three generations after Lewis wrote it. Why are people so confused about morality today and yet so strident in their opinions? Lewis helped me see why, as few others have.

I read this book when it came out in 1985, as I was polishing my first book. I recommended it to a senior colleague who had written several books and edited a leading journal. He took it with him to some beach on winter vacation as he was completing his next book. When he returned, he said he was so engrossed in the book that his wife got mad at him for not putting it down. He loved it as much as I did.

If you have mastered this book, your writing will improve dramatically, and you will not need another style manual for the rest of your life. 

I first read this as a teenager, and its wise counsel has stayed with me ever since. Gowers’ book was originally written as a guide for British government workers, to help them avoid the perils of jargon and ‘officialese’ and write in a way that colleagues and (more importantly) the person in the street could actually understand. 

The fact that I could immediately apply the ideas to my school essays shows you why this book has been continuously in print since the 1950s, and why generations of writers have found it so useful in shaping their own style. 

Practicing exactly what he preaches, Gowers lays down the principles of plain English, in plain English. Read and see why this deserves to be called a classic.

We all want to use language well. But language pundits sometimes promote grammar rules (e.g. no ‘split infinitives’) that contrast with what we hear in speech all the time.

The source of the discrepancy is traditional grammar books, which originated in the 18th Century, and were based on Latin models. But English has always had a different grammatical structure than Latin, and so some traditional ‘rules’ have never made sense. Instead of relying on such traditional prescriptive grammars, it is much better to refer to modern descriptive grammars, which describes how English is actually used nowadays.

These are based on thousands of examples of real written texts and spoken discourse, and so they can confidently report how English is really used in today’s world. The Cambridge Grammar of English is one of the best examples. 

Lincoln was a great communicator, whose greatest speeches deliver emotional power through unfussy language. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the best-selling page-turner Uncle Tom’s Cabin, knew a thing or two about language. She said Lincoln’s compelling words had “the relish and smack of the soil.” Douglas Wilson’s study is an exercise in historical detection. Sleuth-like he uses the successive manuscript drafts of Lincoln’s speeches and public letters to show his care in choosing his words, and how alert he was to sense, sound, imagery, context, and clarity. Lincoln’s Sword is a masterpiece, a showcase of the literary and political sensibilities that made Wilson an acclaimed winner of the Lincoln Prize.