The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

The Guardian has composed their list of the 100 greatest non-fiction books.

The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

The ones that I have read:

1. "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe
2. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave" by Frederick Douglas
3. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
4. "Walden" by H.D. Thoreau 
5. "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche 
6. "The Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli
7. "The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine 
8. "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 
9. "The Wretched of the Earth" by Franz Fanon 
10. "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin
11. "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote
12. "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (I read the abridged volume)
13. "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank 
14. "Die Profundis" by Oscar Wilde 

There are definitely some good ones on the Guardian's list. Tony Judt's "Postwar" is one that I have on my list to get to. I've also never read Primo Levi and also have his books on my list. 

My own list composed of the books I've read on that list includes an interesting blend of titles. I read Nietzsche when I was in my early 20s--and while taking a philosophy course when I was an undergraduate; I didn't find his views to be all that fascinating when compared with John Locke or Michael Foucault who were more interesting in my opinion. "The Communist Manifesto" and "The Prince" are 2 books that go to the extreme when it comes to their political points of view. "Walden" by Thoreau remains as one of my favorite books of all time. Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" is one of the best true-crime novels of the 20th century.