Here are 100 books that The Scottish World fans have personally recommended if you like
The Scottish World.
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I grew up in a strong Scots–speaking environment just before the advent of television, so very much a Scottish village rather than the global village. Speaking several foreign languages and being able to study Scots language and literature at Edinburgh University gave me confidence and the realisation of how special Scots was, and how closely it is tied to the identity of the people and the land. The book is local, national, and international in outlook and is written from the heart and soul, with a strong influence of the Democratic Intellect thrown in to balance the passion. You can also hear me reading the book on Audible.
I received this as a prize at school when I was fifteen and passages like this spoke to me: “...you wanted the words they'd known and used, forgotten in the far‑off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart, how they wrung it and held it.” My Ayrshire community spoke Scots so it was life changing to read this message by an author from a different time and a different place who was intensely relevant to my own situation. Being discouraged or even punished for speaking Scots in school, led us to learn English pretty quickly and this bi-lingual tension gave us an advantage learning other languages like French and German which I studied at University. But I will always be grateful to Sunset Song for making me aware of how important the Scots language was to our identity as Scots: “And the next minute that passed…
'Left me scorched' Ali Smith 'Unforgettable' Guardian
Faced with a choice between a harsh farming life and the world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie chooses to remain in her rural community, bound by her intense love of the land. But everything changes with the arrival of the First World War and Chris finds her land altered beyond recognition.
One of the greatest and most heartbreaking love stories ever told,, Sunset Song offers a powerful portrait of a land and people in turmoil.
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…
There is a saying that you can take the girl out of Scotland but not Scotland out of the girl. I am that girl. Born and raised in Scotland, I earned an MA from Edinburgh University and a M.Litt from Oxford. I met my husband during the summer at Dartmouth College and the rest, as they say, is history. Or, at least it would be, except for the hankering back to Scotland that never leaves. My novel set in Scotland was published by Simon & Schuster.
Hedderwick’s whimsical watercolors and text capture the heart of Scotland’s western isles and something essential about Scots, too. Over the course of a year, she travelled over the waters to and between these islands in her VW Camper, capturing with humor what makes these people tick – often just a brood of kittens nestled in a kitchen cupboard. I turn to this book when I am feeling nostalgic about Scotland. Hedderwick captures for me the undertones of Scottish life.
Mairi Hedderwick embarks on a six-month-long journey to 40 islands from Arran to Lewis, recounting her pilgrimage around the archipelago of the Western Isles with which she has had a lifelong love affair.
Filled with wit and wisdom that is matched by her spell-binding illustrations, Mairi Hedderwick portrays the islands in all their diversity, with swift and perceptive cameos of everyday life drawn with humour and affection alongside gorgeous landscapes which capture the truly magical beauty of the Hebrides.
There is a saying that you can take the girl out of Scotland but not Scotland out of the girl. I am that girl. Born and raised in Scotland, I earned an MA from Edinburgh University and a M.Litt from Oxford. I met my husband during the summer at Dartmouth College and the rest, as they say, is history. Or, at least it would be, except for the hankering back to Scotland that never leaves. My novel set in Scotland was published by Simon & Schuster.
This is an extensive biography of Scotland’s celebrated bard, Robert Burns, and includes a collection of unpublished letters. Scotland’s own “heaven taught ploughman,” gave life a run for its money, giving us in his few but fruitful years lines of poetry that match Shakespeare himself.
Oh, would some
Power the giftie
gie us
To see ourselves as
Others see us!
McIntyre gives Burns a good shot. No Scottish writer, including myself, could think of their career trajectory without Robert Burns standing out prominently along that line. He gave us the gift of hubris and the gift of the poetic gab.
This biography illuminates and explores the complexities and contradictions of Burns's character and personality, untangling the myth from the legend. Based on new evidence from 700 letters Burns wrote during his life, McIntyre concentrates on the circumstances of the writing of poetry itself, and paints a vivid picture of Burns's emotional and impulsive political views, the cruelty and gentleness of which he was capable, stressing the importance and the quality of the satirical poetry as well as the unforgettable love poetry immediately associated with his name.
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
Understanding history is essential for understanding ourselves as human beings – for recognising where we’ve come from and why we live as we do. What I love about historical fiction is that it can take tumultuous times and show their effects on the individuals who lived through them. As a historical novelist, I try to bring history back to a tangible, human level. These short novels show that if a writer’s prose is fresh, witty, and moving, then historical novels don’t need to be enormous tomes to give us a new slant on the past and allow us to inhabit lives utterly different from our own.
The beauty of this novel is that it takes sweeping historical change – the Highland Clearances of Scotland – and manages to make history intimate, showing the impact of events on one vulnerable old woman. In the nineteenth century, much of rural Scotland was forcibly "cleared" of people to make room for sheep grazing. Outside of Scotland, this great tragedy of Scottish history is not as well known as it should be, and neither is Smith’s book.
I love its deliberately naïve style, as we see the world through the old woman’s eyes and feel her pain as history crashes down on her. It’s full of the beauty of the natural world, but it’s also chilling, as it demonstrates the indifference of outsiders to a long-established way of life.
50th anniversary edition of a true modern classic.
'Vividly depicted ... sheer beauty' OBSERVER
'A masterpiece of simplicity' FINANCIAL TIMES
'A simple but noble book ... this deserves to be read' SCOTSMAN
'When she rose in the morning the house at first seemed to be the same. The sun shone through the curtains of her window. On the floor it turned to minute particles like water dancing. Nevertheless, she felt uneasy ...
What had the girl said? Something about the 'burning of houses'. They just couldn't put people out of their houses, and then burn the houses down. No one…
Very little Scottish history or culture was taught in school when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. When I began to read books on the subject from the local library and then studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, I realised what my brother and sister Scots had missed out on, and was determined to rectify that by writing accessible books which would both inform and entertain as well as enrich their lives and change the way they perceived their culture. I love their reaction to my work and the influence my books have had.
The British edition of this provocative book has the modest title The Scottish Enlightenment with the subheadingThe Scots’ Invention of theModern World. I have the original in-your-face American edition though, which rejoices in a title that no Scot would have the brass neck to come up with: How the Scots Invented the Modern World with the subheadingThe True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It.It was given to me by a Philipino-Californian surfing lawyer, Jesse Quinsaat, who studied with me at Edinburgh University in the early 1970s and continues his interest in Scottish culture when surf’s not up or the cases are not too demanding! He had bought the book in San Diego, loved it, and passed it on to me during a visit to Edinburgh.
'Every Scot should read it. Scotland now has the lively, provocative and positive history it deserves.' Irvine Welsh, Guardian
A dramatic and intriguing history of how Scotland produced the institutions, beliefs and human character that have made the West into the most powerful culture in the world.
Arthur Herman argues that Scotland's turbulent history, from William Wallace to the Presbyterian Lords of the Covenant, laid the foundations for 'the Scottish miracle'. Within one hundred years, the nation that began the eighteenth century dominated by the harsh and repressive Scottish Kirk had evolved into Europe's most literate society, producing…
We’re a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive social impact with their careers. Since you have, on average, 80,000 hours in your career, what you decide to do with that time might be your biggest opportunity to make a difference. Over the past ten years, we’ve conducted careful research into high-impact careers, and have helped thousands of people plan a career that has a high positive impact.
Future generations might be very much impacted by the actions we take today: with climate change, nuclear war, or the changes in global values. But we often don’t take their interests into account.
In this book, Will argues that positively influencing the fate of future generations is a key moral priority of our time and that there are things we can do today to make them better off. This may be one of the most important books of our time.
“This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.” —Ezra Klein
An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I’m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.
I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider-from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.
Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty's work-the…
I started my career in neuroscience. I wanted to understand brains. That is still proving difficult, and somewhere along the way, I realized my real motivation was to build things, and I wound up working in AI. I love the elegance of mathematical models of the world. Even the simplest machine learning model has complex implications, and exploring them is a joy.
This is a popular science book, so a little different from the others on this list. It is a beautifully written book that is accessible to people who don’t know much about AI but is simultaneously thought-provoking for experts.
It contains probably the best discussion of "intelligence" that I've read, interesting insights into how Google and other tech giants came to develop their machine learning strategy, and a fascinating chapter that views recommendation engines and their users as parts of a single intelligent organism. It's concise and easy to read.
I've read many popular AI books, which are highly variable in quality, and this criminally underappreciated work is the best by miles.
- The author is one of the most influential AI reseachers of recent decades.
- Written in an accessible language, the book provides a probing account of AI today and proposes a new narrative to connect and make sense of events that happened in the recent tumultuous past and enable us to think soberly about the road ahead.
- The book is divided into ten carefully crafted and easily-digestible chapters, each grapples with an important question for AI, ranging from the scientific concepts that underpin the technology to wider implications for society, using real examples wherever possible.
I grew up in Bordeaux, a city that became prominent during the eighteenth century. My hometown inspired my love of eighteenth-century French studies, which led me to the Sorbonne, then to Yale University where I earned a PhD. Today, I am an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. I am the author of eight novels and monographs published in France and the US, including American Pandemonium, Posthumous America, and Sentinel Island. My work explores numerous genres to question a number of recurring themes: exile and the representation of otherness; nostalgia and the experience of bereavement; the social impact of new technologies; America’s history and its troubled present.
WhileThe Swerveis not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Thingsby Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity.
In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years.
It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
Over the past decade, I’ve become very concerned with the direction authoritarianism is taking human society. It’s a global problem that now infects America, leaving us with a partisan divide we may not be able to bridge. My recommended books helped me understand the situation and how one might speak out against this negative force effectively. Convinced that bombarding readers with facts alone is useless, I chose to provide a novel that is interesting and captivates readers. My goal is to entice readers to press on to the end regardless of their political persuasion, in hopes that along the way some thought will be devoted to the issues raised.
Despite the Covid pandemic, the two biggest threats to human society are political strife and degradation of its food supply through climate change and population explosion. Darren Qualman provides an easily understood discussion of the latter. He starts with the simple closed-loop plant/animal cycle powered by the sun’s energy, which existed up until about 300 years ago. Then, explains how the discovery of coal and oil, invention of the tractor, and development of a process to convert oil into fertilizer changed all that.
As a teenager, I was taught that the population explosion would cause mass starvation in the near future. Darren explains how force-feeding plants and domesticated animals, now using over 400 million tons of oil-based fertilizer each year, forestalled that. But combined with oil, gas, and coal burned today, human society is living with a time-bomb unless we learn to live with energy now available from the sun.
The modern world is wondrous. Its factories produce ten thousand cars every hour and ten trillion transistors every second. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, and nearly a million people are in the air at any time. In Civilization Critical, Darrin Qualman takes readers on a tour of the wonders of the 21st century. But the great strength of our modern word is also its great weakness. Our immense powers to turn resources and nature into products and waste imperil our future. And plans to double and redouble the size of the global economy veto sustainability. So, is our civilization…
