I nominate Fast Food Nation.
Well appart from the Bible (and that is partly fiction anyway 
)
Guinness Book of Records
and if Poetry is allowed
Green Eggs and Ham or Cat in the Hat
I don’t read a lot of nonfiction.
I have read the Bible, and yeah, I do mean the whole thing.
I assume we’re excluding reference works?
The last thing I read that was nonfiction was probably Mike Nelson’s Mind Over Matters, a humorous essay collection.
If you remove the word read I would suspect that a whole bunch have bought and may proudly display A Brief History Of Time.
Would an issue of World Almanac count? Would some reading in an encyclopedia count?
By “read,” I meant read from start to finish, as a single piece of narrative prose. So, yes, I’d exclude stuff that people haven’t read in their entirety (and I strongly suspect the Bible is out on that point).
I’m also excluding reference works and collections of factoids, no matter how popular – so, no dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, or almanacs. Also excluded here is a slew of specific titles: Guiness, The Book of Lists, The People’s Almanac, The Whole Earth Catalogue, The Elements of Style – and, sorry Unca Cece – The Straight Dope et al.
It’s fiction, therefore not applicable.
Microbe Hunters? (showing my age here) for every Doper kid whose parents hoped would go into medicine?
If y’all want to talk about whether the Bible is fiction or nonfiction, you can do it in GD – I’m declaring OP’s privilege and excluding it on the basis that most people haven’t read it start to finish. If you want to challenge that particular point, feel free to open a poll in IMHO.
My first thought reading the title was GGaS. It’s cited here on the boards over and over, hell we’ve even given it an acronym.
My rimshot answer would have been the Bible as well.
Now that poetry is mentioned, Green Eggs and Ham is a wonderful choice.
Lots of people seem to know the Walter Lord Titanic books, A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On. OK, NSM TNLO, but it’s definitely worth it.
Also some of the more prominent books about war history, the biographies like McCullough’s and Caro’s works, and Barbara Tuchman’s *The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, * and The March of Folly.
I would guess most of us have read some of Steven Jay Gould, may he RIP.
James Randi and Martin Gardner’s books of skepticism about psuedoscience.
Finally, I’ve seen mentioned quite often a book over 150 years old at this point but still as interesting and pertinent as ever: Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, still in print. A wonderful readable book and source of great sig material too.
Never even heard of the books in the OP. :dubious:
I second Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Sagan’s Cosmos.
I nominate Windows For Dummies
Even tho I wanted to answer The Bible (parts of it), I think we will have to eliminate any religious works what so ever, as there will be way too debate over the NON fiction catagorising. So, The Talmud, Dianetics, Book of Mormon, Qur’an, The Sayings of Confucius, the four Vedas, etc… are all out of the running.
One of my favorites.
I’ve actually never even heard of GGaS though. :smack:
I’ve read (as in, every word) both the Bible and A Short History of Time … Guns, Germs and Steel is on my Unread Pile.
Also read: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Brunvand’s Vanishing Hitchhiker, Extraordinary Popular Delusions etc., Hofstadter’s Goedel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton Beau de Marot … never read Cosmos, but saw the TV series …
(And, err, why aren’t plays and poems fiction? Last I heard, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner weren’t documentaries … )
Plays are non-fiction? In that case, I’d say either Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet would be the most widely read “non-fiction.”
I’ve never even heard of either of these two books, much less read them. And I thought I was pretty good with my non-fiction reading. shrug
I’d guess something like A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking, or perhaps (for the American dopers) something like Walden or Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or even Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Does David Sedaris count as a non-fiction author? He probably embellishes a bit, but his books are based on his life, I believe.
If so, I nominate Naked. I’ve seen that title pop up almost as often as GGaS (which I bought, started, and gave away).
If you polled dopers, I’m pretty sure that more have read A Child Called It, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I know Why The Caged Bird Sings, The Diary of Anne Frank, Angela’s Ashes or Native Son than Guns, Germs, and Steel. Biographies are something even people who “don’t like non-fiction” can be tempted into picking up now and then.
Well, so much for Beowulf, then.
Plays and poetry most definitely are fiction. The idea that people even suggest the opposite in a thread about literacy and reading is pretty bizarre.
My first reaction was “What? That can’t be right” too, but then I looked up the definition of non-fiction…which is definitely defined as prose. Which poetry isn’t, but I’m not sure about plays. hmmm.