Advantage on Arcana

The AoA Non-Fiction Bookshelf

In my bio, which you can find under "My Character Sheet," I wrote, "One of the convictions motivating this blog [...] is that what we bring to the gaming table also has a lot to do with our experiences away from it."

In that spirit I think I should start putting together a bookshelf on this blog, consisting of books that aren't about ttrpgs but that I've nonetheless found helpful at the gaming table. I do appreciate reviews that put a spotlight on hobby-specific resources, and maybe someday, when I have a bigger ttrpg budget, I'll write my own; until then I think what I can best do is start compiling those resources I use that come from outside the hobby space.

This page, then, will be a bibliography and partial index. I'll note here any non-fiction non-ttrpg book that I notice I'm using to help in an aspect of the hobby; if I think other hobbyists might get the same benefit from the book that I did (and when time allows), I'll write a post about the book and link it below. This is therefore a living document, which might be updated periodically.1 I will arrange the list alphabetically by author name. Although I have called it a bookshelf, I'm not in principle averse to putting films, podcasts, or webpages on it, but I don't have any yet.

My Non-Fiction Bookshelf

  1. Girard, René. A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. Oxford UP: New York, 1991. (WorldCat)
  2. Jones, W. Paul. Theological Worlds : Understanding The Alternative Rhythms Of Christian Belief. Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1989. (WorldCat)
  3. Prothero, Stephen. God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run The World – And Why Their Differences Matter. HarperCollins: New York, 2011. (WorldCat)
  4. Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599. Harper Perennial: New York, 2005. (WorldCat)
  5. Shapiro, James. The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Simon & Schuster: New York, 2015. (WorldCat)
  6. Woodard, Colin. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Penguin Books: New York, 2011. (WorldCat)

(A parenthetical note: I did start a series of book reviews when this blog was new, but I discontinued that series after I gave up on WordPress and did not blog for a few months. I won't list the books I read for that series, at least not yet, because I haven't found them useful at the gaming table so far. Maybe I will in the future.)

  1. Now that I've written it out, "living document" sounds like it could be a fun creature for a fantasy or cyberpunk setting.↩

#books #for GMs #index