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11 Great Books You Probably Haven't Read

2021-09-28 · list · John · 3:57 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing · mode: Advice & reviews · tags: civic or action cta, self promotion

John recommends eleven great books viewers probably haven't read, from a medieval mystery series and Miracle's Boys to books on plague and epidemics, physics, Mary Oliver's essays, Kaveh Akbar's poems and a 1945 Chinese cookbook, and asks for recommendations in return, with Pizzamas six days away.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Pizzamas in six days; fiction: Ann Swinfen, Paul Beatty's Tuff, Miracle's Boys

  • ★★ John's bookshelves are disorganized and need recataloging, but there is no time because Pizzamas starts in six days. — 00:00:00 · Pizzamas
  • ★★ For peaceful hours with a great mystery series, John recommends Ann Swinfen's novels, introduced by Stan Muller: The Bookseller's Tale, first of his favorite series, set in Oxford in 1353 amid medieval bookmaking. — 00:00:00 · Crash Course
  • ★★ For belly laughs and linguistic acrobatics John recommends Paul Beatty's Tuff; Beatty is better known for The White Boy Shuffle and the Booker-winning The Sellout, but John read Tuff 20 years ago and still thinks about it. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Jacqueline Woodson's Miracle's Boys makes John sob and feel hopeful: nominally for kids 10 and up, loved by 44-year-old John too, it is about impoverishment, grief and surviving loss, above all about brothers. — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — Brotherhood; disease books (The Black Death, Epidemics and Society); The Disordered Cosmos

  • ★ John tells Hank he loves a book about brotherhood, and Miracle's Boys might be his favorite. (hedged) — 00:00:58 · Hank Green
  • ★★ Turning to infectious disease, where his brain always goes, John loves Rosemary Horrox's The Black Death, a collection of first-person accounts of the plague. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ John says the Black Death was a four-year period in which approximately half of all Europeans died of plague. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Frank Snowden's Epidemics and Society helped John see that infectious disease has always been among history's most important forces: we think of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra, but it's mostly microbes. — 00:00:58

  • ★★★ The book shows how racism and other discrimination shape disease burden, which shapes history: disease does not treat people equally unless society treats people equally. — 00:01:27 · also in: John Goes ... to the UNITED NATIONS?

    “disease does not treat people equally unless society treats people equally”

  • ★★ John loves Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's physics book The Disordered Cosmos and thinks about it every day. — 00:01:27

  • ★★ The Disordered Cosmos taught John that we don't know why there is matter in the universe, from which he says he has not recovered. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Physics, Phosphorescence, All Together Now, Mary Oliver's Upstream, Pilgrim Bell, a 1945 cookbook

  • ★★ The book helped John, with his fourth-grade physics, understand the Big Bang and dark energy; it is also about gender identity and race; he calls it brilliant and unlike anything he has read. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Julia Baird's Phosphorescence also treats us as participants in reality, not observers: it is about living with cancer, creatures that make their own light and the science of human joy. — 00:01:56 · cancer
  • ★★ Admitting bias, John recommends All Together Now by longtime AFC Wimbledon CEO Erik Samuelson: the greatest underdog sports story of all time, told by one who made it happen. — 00:02:26 · AFC Wimbledon
  • ★★ Mary Oliver is famous for poems, but John loves her essays, especially those in Upstream: he dog-eared almost every page, and her line about reading as one swims to save one's life stuck with him. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ John loves Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar's new poetry book: poems that get richer the more time you spend with them; he has reread it over the last month and it keeps giving him new gifts. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Lastly John recommends the 1945 cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese by Buwei Yang Chao, a Chinese physician who emigrated to the US in the 1920s: out of print for decades, wonderfully postmodern. — 00:02:55 · United States

00:03:24 — The cookbook's importance; ask for recommendations; Bookshop.org list; sign-off

  • ★★ John says the cookbook is hugely historically important: it introduced many Americans to Chinese cooking techniques and coined English terms like stir-fry and potstickers. — 00:03:24
  • ★ John calls for somebody to put the cookbook back in print. — 00:03:24
  • ★★★ John asks viewers to tell him in comments which books he probably hasn't read they would recommend. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ John made a Bookshop.org list with all these books plus a couple of other recommendations, linked below. — 00:03:24

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description teases that Pizzamas is coming, linking pizzamas.com. — video description · Pizzamas
  • ★★ In a comment John says he read a viewer-recommended book, Dear America, on another Nerdfighter's recommendation, should have included it, and will add it to the Bookshop list. — creator comment · United States
  • ★ In a comment John strongly recommends audiobooks to those who struggle with decoding text, saying he often reads by audiobook. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

People: Alexander the Great · Ann Swinfen · Buwei Yang Chao · Chanda Prescod-Weinstein · Cleopatra · Erik Samuelson · Frank Snowden · Jacqueline Woodson · Julia Baird · Kaveh Akbar · Mary Oliver · Paul Beatty · Rosemary Horrox

Projects: Crash Course · Pizzamas

Works: All Together Now · Epidemics and Society · How to Cook and Eat in Chinese · Miracle's Boys · Phosphorescence · Pilgrim Bell · The Black Death · The Bookseller's Tale · The Disordered Cosmos · The Sellout · The White Boy Shuffle · Tuff · Upstream: Selected Essays

Organizations: AFC Wimbledon · Booker Prize · Bookshop.org

Concepts: baryon asymmetry · Big Bang · bioluminescence · cancer · dark energy · Disease burden · gender identity · guotie · infectious disease · racism · stir frying

Places: Oxford · United States

Events: Black Death

Only in the description or credits: Stan Muller

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