The best nonfiction books I’ve read over the past few years.
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2021
- Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe
- How to Think, Alan Jacobs
- Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker
- The House of Government, Yuri Slezkine
- In the Land of the Cyclops, Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Breaking Bread With the Dead, Alan Jacobs
- At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
- Amity and Prosperity, Eliza Griswold
- What Are We Doing Here?, Marilynne Robinson
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2020
- Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
- The White Album, Joan Didion
- The Years, Annie Ernaux
- A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan
- Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
- Notes on the Death of Culture, Mario Vargas Llosa
- Arab and Jew, David K. Shipler
- The John McPhee Reader
- Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller
- The Hemingses of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2019
- Self-Portrait in Black and White, Thomas Chatterton Williams
- The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg
- The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders
- What If This Were Enough?, Heather Havrilesky
- The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson
- The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
- He Held Radical Light, Christian Wiman
- Dreamland, Sam Quinones
- Blood Horses, John Jeremiah Sullivan
- My Private Property, Mary Ruefle
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2018
- The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Plainwater: Essays and Poems, Anne Carson
- Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole
- Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil
- The Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser
- Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan
- The Future Is History, Masha Gessen
- My Promised Land, Ari Shavit
- Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, Anne Truitt
- Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2017
- Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond
- Coming into the Country, John McPhee
- Glass, Irony and God, Anne Carson
- In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, John Donvan and Caren Zucker
- Chekhov, Henri Troyat
- Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
- Is There No Place on Earth for Me? Susan Sheehan
- Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2016
- Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
- The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon
- The Journals of John Cheever
- The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
- The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon
- The Assassins’ Gate, George Packer
- The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
- What Does It Mean to Be White? Robin DiAngelo
- Unfinished Business, Anne-Marie Slaughter
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2015
- Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald
- Being Mortal, Atul Gawande
- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
- The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi
- The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert
- The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
- The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2014
- Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez
- The Unwinding, George Packer
- Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle
- The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon
- The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton
- The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
- Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty
- How Fiction Works, James Wood
- Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte
- Four Fish, Paul Greenberg
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2013
- My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman
- Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon
- The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton
- Pulphead: Essays, John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo
- An American Childhood, Annie Dillard
- How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland
- Overdressed, Elizabeth L. Cline
- Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine
- The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise DeSalvo
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2012
- Lit, Mary Karr
- The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddartha Mukherjee
- The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
- Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans
- Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCulloch
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas G. Carr
- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick
- The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
- Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
- Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Francis Steegmuller
10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2011
- Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
- Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
- New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton
- Dog Years, Mark Doty
- Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
- Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Lives for Animals, Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
- How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, Alain de Botton
- We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch
- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
- Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen