Here are 92 books that Cheating fans have personally recommended if you like
Cheating.
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For most of my life, stillness eluded me. I struggled to be present in any moment, to experience joy or comfort, let alone peace. It took me a virtual lifetime to understand that this exterior version of me, with its incessant mental chatter and negative bias, could no longer control me. I reached a breaking point. Divorced after a lifetime partnership, played out of my most recent company, kids all grown up—utterly alone and without meaningful purpose, the hard inner journey began. I spent years focused on my own journey of self and spiritual development. The payoff is I am now not only more present to life but able to help others on their journeys.
I loved Moneyball and most of Michael Lewis’ books as great storytelling.
It's the story of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team, led by general manager Billy Beane, challenged traditional scouting wisdom in the early 2000s by using data and statistical analysis to build a competitive team on a very small budget.
The message is all about challenging conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, and thinking originally. It was inspirational to me at a time in my business life when I was buoyed by the message and theme.
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I always love to read books that do something or cover things that I’ll never be able to do on my own, and Gray crushes that in this book.
Through an awesome set of interviews with players, Gray breaks down how Black users encounter racism in gaming spaces and how they deal with the ongoing structural problems in games. Gray gives voice to perspectives that aren’t heard enough, and I learned a ton from this book.
In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed affect their experiences of gaming.
The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
Although there have been substantive developments in games since this book was published, it is a fantastic journey through the history of games up until its publication date. Knowing more about where games started and how they were developed for decades informs what games are now; really understanding games requires some history.
I found this to be a smooth, propulsive read, which is not true of a lot of video game histories.
A riveting account of the strange birth and remarkable evolution of the most important development in entertainment since television, Replay is the ultimate history of video games. Based on extensive research and over 140 exclusive interviews with key movers and shakers from gaming's past, Replay tells the sensational story of how the creative vision of game designers gave rise to one of the world's most popular and dynamic art forms.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I always love finding work that challenges how I see things and shifts my perspective in some way. This is one of those books!
Even better, whenever I teach a group about this book and the arguments it makes about games a handful of people have a deep transformation about their understanding of games.
Reading this book will shake up how you think about video games, what they do, and how they work. And you might be in that group of people who can’t stop seeing the world in a different way because of your new perspective!
Argues for the queer potential of video games
While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can-and should-be read queerly.
In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive…
Doug Walsh is the author of over one hundred officially licensed video game strategy guides for BradyGames and Prima Games. From Diablo to Zelda, his work covered nearly every major gaming franchise for two decades.
This smart and at-times hilarious book takes serious, analytical, video game criticism and runs it through the meatgrinder of the gaming- and drug-addicted mind of an adult player. It is a memoir, a love story, and a guide to understanding why, as the title suggests, video games absolutely matter.
In Extra Lives, acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games.
In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the…
I’m a university academic who writes and teaches on American popular culture. I’ve played video games all my life—I remember first playing Breakout and Boot Hill at the local arcade back in the late 1970s as a young child, and yes, I had an Atari VCS. Today, I write, teach, and exhibit work on the history of video games, especially how games depict and connect with the USA. I still play video games, probably too much, and my favorite console is the Sega Dreamcast.
This book is just out and reflects the latest scholarship in historical game studies by a new leading academic. Wright’s book tackles one of the biggest players in the video game industry, Rockstar Games, and seeks to understand how Rockstar plays with American history, culture, and our notions of authenticity. Essential reading.
For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar's franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses.
But what does Rockstar's version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar's games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I’m a lifelong video game obsessive. I think about video game worlds and my relationship with them in the ways most people think about family vacations to the beach or a trip with friends to Las Vegas. Every game I play is an opportunity to experience a new world, and a new culture, and to change myself along the way. Video games are a younger industry than either the music industry or the movie industry, but it’s more than 2.5x bigger than those two industries combined! There are reasons humans are so enamored by video games. The books on my list explore those reasons.
David Sudnow’s Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld is perhaps the earliest account of a person’s obsession with a video game.
Sudnow’s diary-like approach to his relationship with the 1976 arcade game Breakout is captivating. It reads like improv jazz (which isn’t surprising considering Sudnow himself was an accomplished jazz pianist).
For example, here’s Sudnow describing the moments before starting the final phase of his longest game so far: “I feel the attempted seduction of the long lobbing interim, a calm before the storm, the action so laid back that I’m consciously elaborating a rhythm to be ready, set, go for a slam.”
Sudnow shows us that what might seem like simple bleeps and bloops to most people can instead be a life-affirming awakening to others. And how can something so powerful not warrant respect?
Tell your non-gaming friends: video games are poetry!
Just as the video game console market was about to crash into the New Mexico desert in 1983, musician and sociologist David Sudnow was unearthing the secrets of “eye, mind, and the essence of video skill” through an exploration of Atari's Breakout, one of the earliest hits of the arcade world.
Originally released under the title Pilgrim in the Microworld, Sudnow's groundbreaking longform criticism of a single game predates the rise of serious game studies by decades. While its earliest critics often scorned the idea of a serious book about an object of play, the book's modern readers remain fascinated…
I am a sociologist, and I have a passion for ethnographic research. I just love good stories and good storytelling. I’ve published articles on migrant workers, civil society, and labor rights in Southeast Asia. My research interests have expanded to include metaverse technology in education, authentic learning, and the flipped classroom. I have worked as a freelance copywriter, writer, biographer, and editor for a variety of private and non-profit agencies and organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and Michelin Guide. I also trained and competed in Latin dance, the foundations of which have been applied to my writing and teaching.
I love this book because it is a moving, powerful, and remarkable account of the life stories of sixteen women who fought and lived in the dense tropical jungles bordering Malaysia and Thailand during the forty-year guerilla war against the British and Japanese occupation of Malaya.
Through these accounts, we learn who these women are, why they joined the CPM army, and why they stayed so loyal to the movement and its ideals even to this day. Agnes Khoo’s retelling of their stories is accompanied by illuminating excerpts and photographs of women in both civilian dress and combat gear.
We get to learn about the harsh conditions of living in the humid, mosquito-infested jungle, sleeping with giant caterpillars and leeches crawling on their bodies, the constant pangs of hunger, the strange illnesses and diseases that killed many of their comrades, and how the women learned to cope with these…
During the years spanning from 1949 to 1961, communist insurgents fought some 100,000 British troops in the hopes of ending the British presence in Malaya. "What was it like living during that time? What role did the community of women play in the situation? What compromises did they have to make to survive?" Answers lie in this enlightening collection of 16 real-life stories--Malayan women reveal their innermost thoughts on their hopes for a new society, their changing lives, their evolving role in society, and their relationships with their male counterparts.
I grew up in Valladolid, a semi-rural city of Yucatan. My parents loved the history and archaeology of the Yucatan peninsula, which not long ago was a single cultural and linguistic entity. I grew up dreaming of becoming an archaeologist. With time, I became fascinated with people and sociality within and beyond Yucatan, so I became an anthropologist. I trained as an anthropologist in Mexico and Canada, and have done research in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. I live and work in Yucatan, as a professor of anthropology. Good ethnographies are what anthropology is about, and those I write about here are some of the best.
I read this book when I was a teenager growing up in Yucatan.
Stephens’ description of both the everyday life of Yucatecans in local villages and cities, and of the imposing ruins left by the Maya are enchanting. Catherwood’s drawings and plates are both accurate and dream-like representations of Yucatecan life, Maya ruins and artifacts at the time.
The book left vivid pictures in my mind; I could and still can see across Yucatan the traces of what Stephens described and Catherwood caught with his drawings and plates.
This book has resisted the passage of time as a story of travel and discovery. As a tale of adventure and wonderment, it was and remains a brilliant prelude to the ethnography of the area.
Both volumes of John Lloyd Stephens epic accounts of the Yucatan are united in this single volume, complete with over 100 illustrations of encounters on his journeys in Central America.
Prior to the 1840s, when J. L. Stephens published this superb account of his explorations, the Yucatan was only crudely charted by Western explorers. Yet their descriptions of the odd ruins and beautiful landscape intrigued the young John Lloyd Stephens, who spent years yearning to explore and better chart the faraway lands. After a number of years spent traversing Europe and Egypt, Stephens was in 1839 commissioned as a Special…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
Born and raised in Mississippi, I have long been fascinated with the natural history of the South and of the Americas in general. And as an outdoorsy guy, a NOLS graudate, mountain-biker, trail-runner, and paddler, I revel in reading accounts of the early days of Western exploration in the woodlands, mountains, and coastal regions of our hemisphere. Finally, as an avid reader and now author, I constantly seek out enthralling and wide-ranging narratives about exploration, outdoor adventure, and the natural world.
William Bartram is the first great Native American naturalist.
His Travels recount his journeys through the American Southeast between 1773 and 1776, and contain unparalleled descriptions of the flora and fauna of the region, as well as his ethnographic studies of Native Americans there. The Library of America edition is top-notch.
Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, naturalist, intrepid wilderness explorer, and self-styled “philosophical pilgrim,” William Bartram was an extraordinary figure in eighteenth-century American life. The first American to devote himself to what we would now call the environment, Bartram was the most significant American writer before Thoreau and a nature artist who rivals Audubon. He was also a pioneering ethnographer whose works are a crucial source for the study of the Indian cultures of southeastern America. The Library of America presents the first collection of his writings and the largest gathering of his remarkable drawings ever published.
