Fans pick 100 books like A Matter of Taste

This bestselling book is not so much about your memory as how to implant lasting memories in others.

How is it that some events and pieces of information are amazingly memorable, whereas others are lost as soon as our mental backs are turned? In a series of entertaining real-life examples, the authors propose and illustrate ways in which information can be “made to stick.” These include some obvious ones like getting people’s attention and building on their existing knowledge – stuff they are interested in.

Other factors are less obvious; set up an intriguing puzzle, provide some really unexpected information, especially of an emotional kind, embed the new information in an attention-grabbing story. Of course knowing how to teach effectively also reveals much about how memory works!

Malcolm Gladwell never disappoints me. He has said that when people meet him, they treat him like they know him. After years of reading his books and listening to his podcasts, his voice sounds like a friend's.

This book is one of my favorites because it gives me hope that with the right ingredients of passion, hard work, and opportunity, our efforts will tip toward success. It reminds me to open my eyes and watch for opportunities so that when we are in the business of passionate service, we may end up on a great adventure that we could not have predicted.

Many of the books by Seth Godin are amazing, but this is a personal favorite.

Great ideas aren't just ideas; they're like viruses. They spread from person to person in powerful, unexpected ways. The book explores this idea and talks about some of the factors that lead ideas to spread and some of the consequences of their diffusion.

The world is full of great ideas that don’t catch on. Indoor plumbing, for example, took about 2,500 years to become popular. Others, like radio, catch fire seemingly overnight. Why? Rogers produced the seminal work on this topic, which has now gone through five editions of updates.

He sets out clear patterns of how innovations get taken up—or struggle to. He delves into many examples to prove his points, and he always makes the reader think. Before you focus on your wonderful idea, think about what will make the idea be accepted quickly by the marketplace. As Rogers shows, that will save you vast amounts of work down the road.

I love how this book takes a protagonist steeped in noir tropes and drops him into a shattered world that doesn’t seem to understand him. He’s a trench coat and a fedora in a ruined sci-fi world of technology and crime. This isn’t the deepest read on the list, but it’s a ton of fun and does some interesting things to subvert the sci-fi noir tropes.

This anthology spans a remarkable and surprising range of topics including first-hand accounts by pageant winners—and losers—along with rich historical context. Historian Kimberly Hamlin documents the first Miss America Pageant (launched a year after women won the vote), showing how it both appropriated the format of suffrage pageants and defined itself in opposition to them. Feminist scholar Donelle Ruwe explains why becoming Miss Meridian [Miss.] in 1985 had an unexpectedly positive impact on her life, even though she considers beauty pageants to be “oppressive” and “degrading.” And the African-American scholar Gerald Early’s riveting “Waiting for Miss America” weighs the racial implications of Vanessa Williams’ 1983 crowning as the first Black Miss America. “[S]he was the most loved and most suspect woman in America,” he writes. Suspect, because “some blacks don’t trust her motives and some whites don’t trust her abilities.”  

This is the book I wish I could have given my younger self when I first noticed that the ecological world around me was deteriorating. Species were going extinct as the world heated up. In my education as a scientist, I learned that the physical causes of the environmental crisis are simple (burning fossil fuels, converting land to pasture, and so on), but no one seemed to have the power to do anything to fix it.

In this book, Mau brilliantly shows why we feel so unable to change the world. Everyone, including CEOs, are constrained by capitalism. People might personally care about the environment, but if the money doesn’t work out, they are forced to act otherwise. This isn’t an exclusively environmental book, but it offers a powerful perspective on the forces behind the crisis.

We all loved Freakonomics. The incredible Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt did it again in their second book Super Freakonomics.

Thinking like an economist is a powerful tool. What might surprise you are the motley assortment of questions that you can think about from the perspective of an economist.

This book is bold, funny, and insightful. And what’s the underlying theme? Well, it’s one thing all economists can agree on – incentives matter. Dubner and Levitt are masterful storytellers and teachers.

Even if you aren’t interested in thinking like an economist, their perspective on topics covered is worth the read. 

Szuchman and Anderson use the framework of economics principles to look at marital relationships. Though the book was written as more of a self-help marriage guide, it’s an excellent introductory primer to many economic theories. 

Every chapter introduces and defines an economic theory–including moral hazard, comparative advantage, loss aversion, supply and demand, and incentives. Then the authors profile a married couple in crisis and describe how the economic theory fits the marital problem.

It’s a fascinating way of narrowing the larger issues of how to allocate scarce resources into the domestic sphere. I found applying economic theories to married couple fights helped me better understand economics as a whole, and the ways I make decisions in every part of my life.

Additionally, this book can be laugh-out-loud funny.

A history of campus pageants going back to the 1920s, Queens of Academe considers not only their “calibrations of class and femininity,” but also their racial and (overwhelmingly Christian) religious underpinnings. Tice chronicles how campus competitions (many of which are feeder pageants for Miss America) allayed fears that educated women would renounce home and hearth, and traces the ways they’ve evolved to reflect social progress. Two chapters—“We are Here: Pageants as Racial ‘Homeplaces’ and Ethnic Combat Zones” and “Flesh and Spirit: Bibles, Beauty and Bikinis”—examine neglected aspects of pageant scholarship, showing how Black swimsuit contestants faced a unique challenge in deflecting the pernicious Jezebel trope by proving their worth through demonstrations of etiquette, grooming, and racial progress. Even male contestants swagger through these pages—including a Mr. Harvard hopeful who competed in see-through tape and rose-petal pasties.