Worldbuilders Book Club Rec List
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ladybusinessFriend of the blog quartzen has started a challenge on Storygraph called Worldbuilder's Book Club with the goal of reading twelve non-fiction books in different categories to inspire worldbuilding.
I thought it would be fun to do a rec list based on the challenge. I have recommended one or two books in each category. Many of these books can fit into multiple categories, but I tried to put them into the ones that make the most sense to me. This list reflects my somewhat eclectic interests, which include Chinese history, urban planning, and ecology.
I'm especially interested in books about food and material culture and books about how people in the past understood the world. I've also tried to choose books that are good for worldbuilding, things that showcase unexpected connections and highlight interesting details.
I like to read books by experts writing about their area of expertise, and so I read a fair number of academic books, a trend that’s reflected in this list. Academic books can skew more expensive, so t's worth checking your local library or looking for used copies.
Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 by Gina Anne Tam—
Language is intensely political. This book describes the political history of Chinese languages, showing how complicated language is and how political it can be. Language is an important part of national identity, and politics shape how we speak. Many writers enjoy making up languages for their worlds, and this book gives a useful perspective on how language fits into the rest of the world.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein— Fair warning: this book is enraging. It's a compelling study of systematic racism in the US, and it illustrates the ways that laws can interact with social forces to support injustice. I appreciated how clearly written the book is.
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz— Sugar doesn't seem like an obvious fit for this category, but this book uses sugar to understand the links between slavery and the early industrial revolution. Truly a world-spanning book! This book is helpful for understanding the complicated connections between labor and capital, and the ways that international trade impacts daily life.
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon— This is a book about the different ways Native Americans and Europeans understood the concept of property and how that affected their interactions. In terms of worldbuilding, this is a good book for thinking about culture conflict and how much our understanding of the world is socially constructed. I also appreciated that the book shows how different ideas about property had real, material consequences for how people treated the landscape.
Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China by Buyun Chen— I'm fascinated with textiles and adored this book. I really like how it looks at so many aspects of silk, including fashion, trade, and politics. Did you know that silk cloth was used as currency? I loved how this book started with something that many people consider frivolous and drew connections to politics and trade, empire building, and philosophy. It's an excellent example of the ways material culture is deeply connected to social and political systems.
The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World by Anne Gerritsen— You might think from the title of this book that it's a history of porcelain; it is, but it explores not just how porcelain was made but also how porcelain was traded, and how that linked China to the rest of the world. Like Empire of Style, this book starts with something seemingly frivolous and links it outward, until the reader understands more and more of the broader context. I appreciated how this book shows the complexity of trade in the early modern world.
Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual by Jiren Feng— This book is a deep dive into one particular building manual and the metaphors it uses. Reading this made me really appreciate the multi-layered brackets in traditional Chinese architecture; they are just so cool! This book illustrates some of the ways metaphorical ideas shape the physical environment and vice versa.
City of Marvel and Transformation: Changan and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China by Linda Rui Feng— This is a book about the experience of living in Chang'an, during the Tang Dynasty, when it was a cosmopolitan capital of a far-reaching empire. Cities aren't just their physical environments but also the web of human relationships that exist within those environments. This book captures some of that interplay. It also gives a sense of the cultural weight Chang'an had through examining the city in stories. All of this is really useful for worldbuilding, where you want to capture not just the physical environment but how your characters feel about it.
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon— You might be wondering why I put a book with "Metropolis" in the title under rural life and agriculture. Well, it's because this is a book about the connections between the urban and the rural. This book blew my mind when I first read it! It's very much a book about how people understood nature and how that affected their material lives. The chapter on corn futures is especially brilliant, explaining complex ideas very understandably.
Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 by Martin Bruegel— This is a book about how increased industrialization and the shift to a more market-based economy impacted rural life, and how changing technology and markets affected daily life in the Hudson Valley. I especially enjoyed the discussion of timekeeping: it once wasn't common to have clocks everywhere, and the increased access to accurate timekeeping changed how people thought about time. All of this would be great worldbuilding material!
Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China by Francesca Bray— This book is less about textiles than the title might indicate. Instead, it's divided into three sections: one about houses, one about textile production, and one about reproduction. The book looks at women's lives and labor in all of these contexts. Understanding just how much work is required to achieve things we take for granted these days (like making clothes) is important for worldbuilding. A world seems more real when we have some sense of how things are made.
White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain— Bread is such a staple of everyday life in many places. This book looks at white bread, primarily in the US, discussing labor, changes in diet, and changes in agriculture, among other things. I love worldbuilding that hints at a bigger picture with every detail, and this book shows how an ordinary food can say a lot about the society that consumes it.
Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn—
This was the first book I read about Chinese history, so it has a special place in my heart. It's a really interesting look at how religion shapes material culture. Plus it's got lots of details about how people in the past prepared tea!
Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China by Antje Richter— I love epistolary stories, and I've used this book a lot in my own writing. But even if you don't want to write stories set in handwavy historical China, there's a lot here to inspire worldbuilding, stuff about what letters were written on, how people structured them, and what they wrote about.
The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko—
I'm really fascinated by the material culture of writing in China, especially inkstones. They are both gorgeous and functional. This book centers on one particular craftwoman and how she related to her clients, and her later legacy. It's an interesting look at the interplay between artists and society.
Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China by Craig Clunas— This is a book about people in Ming China who collected art and antiques and the role those collections played in their lives. It can be easy to forget that people in the past were also interested in old things. And it's fascinating to see how collectors in the past were similar and different to people today.
Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine by Hilary A. Smith— This book traces the history of foot qi, a disease that has existed for a long time, but has been understood very differently during that time. This is very much a “how people in the past understood the world” book, and it's so interesting! It really shows how disease is socially constructed. Reading this book made me rethink my own understanding of disease.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson— This is the story of John Snow, who theorized that cholera is waterborne. The book shows how he used maps to support his theory and also discusses how his ideas were received. It presents a complex picture of how our understanding of the world changes.
The Rise of West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty by Xiaolin Duan— Where the previous rec focuses on maps, this rec focuses on a specific location. This book made me fall in love with West Lake. There's all kinds of interesting things in here, including water management, agriculture, tourism, and art. All of this combines to paint a vivid picture of a specific time and place.
The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 by Ling Zhang— This book describes the devastating flooding that occurred when the Yellow River changed course during the Northern Song dynasty. It shows that the change in the river's course was neither a purely natural event nor solely caused by political choices, but was rather a combination. It's a study of how empire and environment interacted. If you are writing about the politics of empire, this is very much worth reading.
Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier by Jeffrey A. Lockwood— I vividly remember clouds of locusts featuring as a natural disaster in many books I read as a child. This book asks what happened to the locust? Why did it disappear? The story is told as a compelling mystery that also deeply examines the links between humans and the natural world.
Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature by D. Graham Burnett— While this book uses a trial as its jumping-off point, it's not a legal history. Rather, it's a book about how different groups of people (scientists, the general public, etc.) in early 1800s New York understood whales. I love this kind of thing! This would be great for worldbuilding inspiration about common knowledge as compared to more specialized.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer— This collection of essays on plants and community, written by a biologist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is so good! It helped me think about nature in new ways. One of my favorite parts is where Kimmerer talks about learning to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together. She makes one realize that this seemingly solitary act depends on community.
Arguably, most of the books above could be considered deep dives, so I’m going to use this section to rec some books that I think would be good for inspiring worldbuilding but don’t fit elsewhere.
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food by Warren Belasco— This book is very much what it says on the tin. Belasco looks at predictions of food in the future, from Maltus onward. Along the way he considers SFF, journalism, nutrition textbooks, USDA reports, and more. This book looks at how and why we make predictions about the future. It's not only useful as a tour of ideas about futuristic food, but also as a path to understanding the way worldbuilding builds on our assumptions.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen— This book is a food-centric family history/memoir with recipes. It's a moving story but also a close look at how social and political change impacts daily life.
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ— A classic of feminist literary criticism, this book shows the many ways that women's writing is dismissed. It's infuriating, but well worth reading. This book was written forty years ago, and yet the phenomena it describes continue.
I hope you find some of these books useful or interesting.
I thought it would be fun to do a rec list based on the challenge. I have recommended one or two books in each category. Many of these books can fit into multiple categories, but I tried to put them into the ones that make the most sense to me. This list reflects my somewhat eclectic interests, which include Chinese history, urban planning, and ecology.
I'm especially interested in books about food and material culture and books about how people in the past understood the world. I've also tried to choose books that are good for worldbuilding, things that showcase unexpected connections and highlight interesting details.
I like to read books by experts writing about their area of expertise, and so I read a fair number of academic books, a trend that’s reflected in this list. Academic books can skew more expensive, so t's worth checking your local library or looking for used copies.
1. Politics, Crime, and Law
Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 by Gina Anne Tam—
Language is intensely political. This book describes the political history of Chinese languages, showing how complicated language is and how political it can be. Language is an important part of national identity, and politics shape how we speak. Many writers enjoy making up languages for their worlds, and this book gives a useful perspective on how language fits into the rest of the world.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein— Fair warning: this book is enraging. It's a compelling study of systematic racism in the US, and it illustrates the ways that laws can interact with social forces to support injustice. I appreciated how clearly written the book is.
2. Diplomacy, Military Conflict, and International Relations
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz— Sugar doesn't seem like an obvious fit for this category, but this book uses sugar to understand the links between slavery and the early industrial revolution. Truly a world-spanning book! This book is helpful for understanding the complicated connections between labor and capital, and the ways that international trade impacts daily life.
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon— This is a book about the different ways Native Americans and Europeans understood the concept of property and how that affected their interactions. In terms of worldbuilding, this is a good book for thinking about culture conflict and how much our understanding of the world is socially constructed. I also appreciated that the book shows how different ideas about property had real, material consequences for how people treated the landscape.
3. Travel, Trade, and Migration
Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China by Buyun Chen— I'm fascinated with textiles and adored this book. I really like how it looks at so many aspects of silk, including fashion, trade, and politics. Did you know that silk cloth was used as currency? I loved how this book started with something that many people consider frivolous and drew connections to politics and trade, empire building, and philosophy. It's an excellent example of the ways material culture is deeply connected to social and political systems.
The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World by Anne Gerritsen— You might think from the title of this book that it's a history of porcelain; it is, but it explores not just how porcelain was made but also how porcelain was traded, and how that linked China to the rest of the world. Like Empire of Style, this book starts with something seemingly frivolous and links it outward, until the reader understands more and more of the broader context. I appreciated how this book shows the complexity of trade in the early modern world.
4. Urban Life and Architecture
Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual by Jiren Feng— This book is a deep dive into one particular building manual and the metaphors it uses. Reading this made me really appreciate the multi-layered brackets in traditional Chinese architecture; they are just so cool! This book illustrates some of the ways metaphorical ideas shape the physical environment and vice versa.
City of Marvel and Transformation: Changan and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China by Linda Rui Feng— This is a book about the experience of living in Chang'an, during the Tang Dynasty, when it was a cosmopolitan capital of a far-reaching empire. Cities aren't just their physical environments but also the web of human relationships that exist within those environments. This book captures some of that interplay. It also gives a sense of the cultural weight Chang'an had through examining the city in stories. All of this is really useful for worldbuilding, where you want to capture not just the physical environment but how your characters feel about it.
5. Rural Life and Agriculture
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon— You might be wondering why I put a book with "Metropolis" in the title under rural life and agriculture. Well, it's because this is a book about the connections between the urban and the rural. This book blew my mind when I first read it! It's very much a book about how people understood nature and how that affected their material lives. The chapter on corn futures is especially brilliant, explaining complex ideas very understandably.
Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 by Martin Bruegel— This is a book about how increased industrialization and the shift to a more market-based economy impacted rural life, and how changing technology and markets affected daily life in the Hudson Valley. I especially enjoyed the discussion of timekeeping: it once wasn't common to have clocks everywhere, and the increased access to accurate timekeeping changed how people thought about time. All of this would be great worldbuilding material!
6. Work, Labor, and Daily Life
Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China by Francesca Bray— This book is less about textiles than the title might indicate. Instead, it's divided into three sections: one about houses, one about textile production, and one about reproduction. The book looks at women's lives and labor in all of these contexts. Understanding just how much work is required to achieve things we take for granted these days (like making clothes) is important for worldbuilding. A world seems more real when we have some sense of how things are made.
White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain— Bread is such a staple of everyday life in many places. This book looks at white bread, primarily in the US, discussing labor, changes in diet, and changes in agriculture, among other things. I love worldbuilding that hints at a bigger picture with every detail, and this book shows how an ordinary food can say a lot about the society that consumes it.
7. Culture and Religion
Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn—
This was the first book I read about Chinese history, so it has a special place in my heart. It's a really interesting look at how religion shapes material culture. Plus it's got lots of details about how people in the past prepared tea!
Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China by Antje Richter— I love epistolary stories, and I've used this book a lot in my own writing. But even if you don't want to write stories set in handwavy historical China, there's a lot here to inspire worldbuilding, stuff about what letters were written on, how people structured them, and what they wrote about.
8. Arts and Material Culture
The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko—
I'm really fascinated by the material culture of writing in China, especially inkstones. They are both gorgeous and functional. This book centers on one particular craftwoman and how she related to her clients, and her later legacy. It's an interesting look at the interplay between artists and society.
Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China by Craig Clunas— This is a book about people in Ming China who collected art and antiques and the role those collections played in their lives. It can be easy to forget that people in the past were also interested in old things. And it's fascinating to see how collectors in the past were similar and different to people today.
9. Science and Technology
Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine by Hilary A. Smith— This book traces the history of foot qi, a disease that has existed for a long time, but has been understood very differently during that time. This is very much a “how people in the past understood the world” book, and it's so interesting! It really shows how disease is socially constructed. Reading this book made me rethink my own understanding of disease.
10. Geography and Cartography
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson— This is the story of John Snow, who theorized that cholera is waterborne. The book shows how he used maps to support his theory and also discusses how his ideas were received. It presents a complex picture of how our understanding of the world changes.
The Rise of West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty by Xiaolin Duan— Where the previous rec focuses on maps, this rec focuses on a specific location. This book made me fall in love with West Lake. There's all kinds of interesting things in here, including water management, agriculture, tourism, and art. All of this combines to paint a vivid picture of a specific time and place.
11. Weather and Climate
The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 by Ling Zhang— This book describes the devastating flooding that occurred when the Yellow River changed course during the Northern Song dynasty. It shows that the change in the river's course was neither a purely natural event nor solely caused by political choices, but was rather a combination. It's a study of how empire and environment interacted. If you are writing about the politics of empire, this is very much worth reading.
Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier by Jeffrey A. Lockwood— I vividly remember clouds of locusts featuring as a natural disaster in many books I read as a child. This book asks what happened to the locust? Why did it disappear? The story is told as a compelling mystery that also deeply examines the links between humans and the natural world.
12. Flora and Fauna
Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature by D. Graham Burnett— While this book uses a trial as its jumping-off point, it's not a legal history. Rather, it's a book about how different groups of people (scientists, the general public, etc.) in early 1800s New York understood whales. I love this kind of thing! This would be great for worldbuilding inspiration about common knowledge as compared to more specialized.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer— This collection of essays on plants and community, written by a biologist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is so good! It helped me think about nature in new ways. One of my favorite parts is where Kimmerer talks about learning to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together. She makes one realize that this seemingly solitary act depends on community.
Bonus: 13. Single-Topic Deep Dive
Arguably, most of the books above could be considered deep dives, so I’m going to use this section to rec some books that I think would be good for inspiring worldbuilding but don’t fit elsewhere.
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food by Warren Belasco— This book is very much what it says on the tin. Belasco looks at predictions of food in the future, from Maltus onward. Along the way he considers SFF, journalism, nutrition textbooks, USDA reports, and more. This book looks at how and why we make predictions about the future. It's not only useful as a tour of ideas about futuristic food, but also as a path to understanding the way worldbuilding builds on our assumptions.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen— This book is a food-centric family history/memoir with recipes. It's a moving story but also a close look at how social and political change impacts daily life.
Bonus 14. Literary Criticism
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ— A classic of feminist literary criticism, this book shows the many ways that women's writing is dismissed. It's infuriating, but well worth reading. This book was written forty years ago, and yet the phenomena it describes continue.
I hope you find some of these books useful or interesting.
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Date: 2023-01-24 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-25 06:14 am (UTC)So many good recs here. That whale book in particular sounds FASCINATING and I want to look into it. What a strange and precisely focused topic! I have been listening to a great podcast about evolution lately (it's called Common Descent) and I think the way humans' understanding of how evolution works, and of what is actually related to what, is so interesting.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-28 05:27 pm (UTC)Thanks also for the non-fiction recs - all of those sound so interesting, including the one of these that I've read. :)
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Date: 2023-02-03 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-29 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-03 05:14 pm (UTC)