Best non-fiction books of the 2020s so far?

December 11, 2023 6:06 AM

Which non-fiction of the past three years will you still be recommending in 2030? I'm looking for more to add to my reading list.

I suspect I'll still be recommending The Jakarta Method and Coffeeland, both detailed books about a specific slice of colonialism/imperialism that gave me pictures of the nuts and bolts of how it worked.

posted by clawsoon to Writing & Language (23 answers total)

The Wager by David Grann
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
posted by hepta at 6:33 AM on December 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Econobabble by Richard Denniss
Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff
posted by flabdablet at 7:08 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Two that have really stayed with me are Free by Lea Ypi and Ellis Island: A People's History by Małgorzata Szejnert.
posted by Lluvia at 7:13 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Apparently I like memoirs... I enjoyed:
Dying of Politeness, a memoir by Geena Davis.

In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain by Tom Vitale

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig
posted by hydra77 at 7:17 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
An Immense World by Ed Yong
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
posted by theory at 7:27 AM on December 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant. Fort McMurray, Alberta, and everywhere else on the planet.

The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World by James Crawford. Crawford, from Scotland, encounters and interprets the human impulse to divide.
posted by xaryts at 7:40 AM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown (essays)
posted by FencingGal at 7:40 AM on December 11, 2023

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
posted by lovableiago at 8:10 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm seconding the recommendation for Smith's How the Word Is Passed. I'm also going to nominate Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine: it's an utterly engrossing history of the Luddite Rebellion that has a lot of eery contemporary resonance (I bought it on audiobook and plan to read it in print the second time round). I also enjoyed Andrea Elliot's Invisible Child (it might pair well with hepta's recommendation of Desmond's Povery, By America)): I appreciated Elliot's writing, but was especially impressed by the way she writes about her own positionality as a journalist.
posted by lavenderhaze at 8:19 AM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

You may enjoy the responses to this nearly-identical question from a couple months back.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:40 AM on December 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything if you haven't already.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:09 AM on December 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Verge - Patrick Wyman
Helgoland - Carlo Rovelli
William Blake vs. the World - John Higgs
12 Bytes - Jeanette Winterson
Underland - Robert Macfarlane (which it turns out was first published in 2019; I didn't read it until a year or so ago. I include it nonetheless because I think, more than any other non-fiction work I can remember reading, it'll likely still be significant and moving not just 10 years, but generations down the line.)
posted by protorp at 10:36 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, also The Song of the Cell - Siddhartha Mukherjee which I'm only halfway through at the moment but is riveting, just as excellent a piece of popular science / science history writing as his earlier books on Genes and Cancer.
posted by protorp at 10:40 AM on December 11, 2023

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist
posted by apartment dweller at 10:14 PM on December 11, 2023

Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick
posted by colourlesssleep at 3:01 AM on December 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Inciting Joy: Essays and The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food by Gina Rae La Cerva

Resilience: Connecting with Nature in a Time of Crisis by Melanie Choukas-Bradley
posted by wicked_sassy at 11:10 AM on December 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House by Rachel Maddow & Michael Yarvitz. Impossible to put down.
posted by SisterHavana at 10:15 PM on December 13, 2023

Mod note: [By the way, this has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:46 AM on December 18, 2023

I will keep recommending Jeff Sharlet's excellent book, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. A literate, sharp, and clear-eyed look at the convergence of politics and religion and gun culture, and the writing is gorgeous: "That is the great truth of our paranoia now: Not knowing. Not needing to. Not knowing as its own dim, dreaming certainty." And: "We've got to go through it. The whiteness, this stolen land. Into the smoky, copper-bright uncertain reckoning with the haunted past, which is hard, learning to love the smouldering days ahead, which is harder." It's an unsettling read, and I think it's ahead of its time.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:00 PM on December 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Marx for Cats by Leigh Claire La Berge
An Immense World by Ed Yong
The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Utopianism for a Dying Planet by Gregory Claeys
posted by daniel_charms at 1:41 AM on December 19, 2023

Kent State, a non-fiction graphic novel by Derf Backderf.
posted by JDC8 at 10:12 AM on December 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland is astonishing.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:33 PM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, the new 2023 edition of David Cavanagh's history of Creation Records is excellent.
posted by Paul Slade at 6:28 AM on December 22, 2023