How about Edward Shorter’s history of the female body (gruesomely gripping), March Bloch’s The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (just plain fun), or Propp’s Analysis of Folk Tales (the answer to sooo many questions!).

Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner
Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter?
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism adn the politics of recognition.

There’s more, but I can’t think of them now.

I’ll support anything by AO Hirschman, and JK Galbraith too – there are many good novels that are not as enjoyable as anything Galbraith wrote.

Walzer is sometimes sloppy but always readable. In that vein, include Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and the Intro to his History of Sexuality (yes, he disavowed it later in the series, but it’s really enjoyable nad thought-provoking, which are the criteria here, right?

And as mentioned in a thread a long time ago, Courtesans and Fishcakes can’t be beat.

However, as I went through the list all I could think about was Nicolas Nassim Taleb’s answer to the question … What do you know but cannot prove? From ‘the edge’. His answer seems quite apt not only for this thread but for a large proportion of CT.

Maybe it’s cheating because he was my advisor, but Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, his big early statement on science fiction fan culture, is both a rich synthesis of scholarly threads and a nonstop pleasure to read. Henry’s a real popularizer, and I think he always writes with as wide a readership in mind as possible, so Textual Poachers takes time to spell out at every step where his arguments are coming from – but it still makes what were, at the time (and still will be for the uninitiated), pretty radical claims about the richness of fan culture. The best recommendation I can give? Fans all over the place cite Henry and his book as necessary reading, and no scholar of fandom can write without it. (And for the record: he’s a jewel of a human being.)

There’s a book of articles from the first three issues of the journal Artificial Life journal, edited by Christopher Langton – the book’s just called Artificial Life: An Overview. The articles bring across a sense of excitement at the early stages of a field’s development, and though they’re scholarly articles there’s nothing too difficult for a bright layman in there.

Speaking of which, though: the best-written technical book in any field is Larry Wall’s ‘Camel Book’, Programming in Perl. The opening chapters are an object lesson in bringing across huge ideas with both style and seriousness. The back half is the standard Perl reference work. Even a non-programmer can gain a lot from the early matter, including a brief Perl tutorial.

And where’s the mention of Northrop Frye?

Niall Ferguson’s ‘The Pity of War’ about the Great War is very readable and has an interesting thesis: Britain shouldn’t have joined in, in doing so it made the Age of Catastrophe.

A. J. P. Talor’s ‘England, 1914 – 45’ is fantastic: funnny and penetrating.

Carlo Ginzberg, ‘The Cheese and the Worms’ is gripping both as a tale and a methodologically brilliant approach to pre-modern peasant consciousness.