Fans pick 100 books like Fun, Taste, & Games

Sheff's 1994 story is still the most incisive narrative history of Nintendo. It's full of all the ups and downs you expect in a process-oriented tome. But it also has soul, delivered by the wonder-filled mind of Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario and the Legend Of Zelda series. Today, no journalist could ever get inside Nintendo, which is as closed off to its inner workings as Apple is. But Sheff got inside, way inside, and every reader is the better for it.

Steve's sprawlingly wonderful book is not only an essential (and the first) oral history of video games' early years. The author takes you inside the minds of the (mainly) white men who pioneered a form of entertainment media that's now bigger than all forms of popular art combined. Just as it makes you think of the brilliance of these slick hucksters and brainy engineers who created a new form of culture, it makes you think that games would have benefitted greatly from more diversity back then - and now.

Of the small subgenre books that deal with the way games aid education, Toppo's shows how games can make a difference in the way students learn by looking at first at a Washington, D.C. school's success with improving math scores through game playing. From there, he visits professors and visionaries, all of whom have helped kids learn through games. One thing becomes clear: if there were a games class in every school, especially in underserved communities, student grades would go up.

No one's written the perfect history of the PlayStation. But this illustration-rife, Kickstarted book for fans details the secrets of Sony's history with consoles, including rare photos of collectibles and decent interviews of 26 of the key developers, like PaRappa The Rapper co-creator Rodney Alan Greenblatt and Crash Bandicoot co-creator Jason Rubin. Yes, they could have included interviews with key U.S execs like Andrew House and Mark Cerny. Still, it works. Dimension-wise, the book's not large enough to be a coffee table book. But that's what it feels like, and an indispensable one at that.

This delightful book erases the stiff, sepia portraits of a bygone age, painting the Victorian world in living color. It shreds the era’s image as fun-challenged. The Victorians knew how to have a rollicking good time, inventing popular entertainment on a commercial scale.

In two generations, theatrical performances, professional sporting events, and seaside holidays were accessible to the masses. Jackson traces the social and economic transformations that made it possible.

This book explores McLuhan’s relationship with avant-garde art. While McLuhan’s engagement with artistic endeavours, has received some attention, Kitnick examines in detail not only how McLuhan’s work on art developed over an extended period, but how his views on artistic practice came to inform the work of others. He builds on McLuhan’s contention that art was not primarily a means of self-expression, but rather the basis for cultural exploration and environmental change. Drawing inspiration from figures such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. McLuhan, according to Kitnick, saw members of the avant-garde as artists who work within conventional structures in order to disrupt them, thereby throwing them into relief. 

While critical thinking is not synonymous with philosophy, philosophical principles like logic and epistemology play a huge role in thinking systematically and productively. If you’re interested in how these new and revolutionary ways of thinking were born, I highly recommend this 2003 tour of the history of early Western philosophy, from Ancient Greece through the Medieval Age, by former Executive Editor of the Economist Anthony Gottlieb. If that book leaves you hungry for more, Gottlieb’s second title the series, The Dream of Enlightenment, continues the story of Western philosophy through the start of the modern era.  

In past and present narratives of the Marquesas, along with other Pacific paradises, writers tend toward sensational or romantic exaggeration. T. Walter Herbert sets the record straight, showing what Melville likely encountered during his sojourn to Nukuhiva. In Herbert’s book, Melville is one of three examples of visitors to the islands, along with ship’s captain David Porter, whose narrative describes his laying violent waste to villages in the interior, and missionary William Alexander. Herbert shows what these visitors misunderstood about people characterized as “savages” and “barbarians”—readings that continue to influence cultural attitudes today. No one writes with quite the controlled fury and keen insight of this author!

This is a widely-scorned book whose ideas are no longer in philosophical fashion. But it was the work that first hooked me into philosophy, and I recommend it for its sheer verve and confidence. Freddie Ayer visited Vienna in the 1930s and when he returned to the UK he introduced the ideas of the Vienna Circle into the Anglo-American world. The book argued that propositions that were not testable – for example some assertions about God, or about ethics or aesthetics – were meaningless because they were not verifiable. Amazing claims!

Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting sadly passed away right before COVID, but not before writing countless articles, many of them on the New York Times philosophy website The Stone, showing practical uses of the philosophical tradition. Many of his thoughts are collected in his 2015 book What Philosophy Can Do which includes chapters on how philosophical practices can help us better argue about politics and religion, better understand the power, nature (and limitations) of science, and how to think about education and art. Gutting’s thoughtful and insightful writing provides practical ways to navigate a contentious age using tools that have been helping people argue about and even solve difficult problems for over two thousand years. For anyone laboring under the delusion that philosophy is an exercise in abstraction, suitable for the classroom and research symposium, but little else, What Philosophy Can Do will cure you of that stereotype.