The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker
This book is a lesson in why you shouldn't take thirty years to finish your nonfiction works. A fascinating concept about the basic building blocks of story, unfortunately based heavily in the discredited psychological theories of Carl Jung. The first... third? Maybe? of the book is good and interesting, and so is the history of the breakdown of the archetypical plots over human history... including the last chapter called 'The Age of Loki' (I think... it's on my kindle and my kindle is broken :( ). So, if you can somehow manage to skip all the stuff about the 'light/dark feminine/masculine' and the 'anima/animus', it's worth flicking through, particularly if you're interested in the mechanics of stories.
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
Speaking of the feminine and masculine, this (nonfiction) work about the nature vs nuture gender neurology. I wanted to read this after reading 'The Female Brain' and 'The Male Brain' because I like having both sides of a story, and I must say, I'm glad that I have read all three. It would have been less enlightening if I weren't familiar with Louise Brizendine's work, because the book is essentially a detailed criticism of said work. Pretty much that's it. Fine breaks down the flaws in Brizendine's research and statistics and pretty much points out that Brizendine's conclusions about neurological gender difference are fallacious. And that's it. Fine doesn't really provide any new research or hypotheses of her own, except to discredit Brizendine, and that's OK, I mean it needed to be done, but she didn't really seem to have a point of her own to make. OK, if you're interested in how we aren't genetically programmed to think certain ways according to our gender, but otherwise, meh?
I... can't. It's amazing. Go read it.
