I’m often asked to recommend non-fic books, particularly to people who don’t read a lot or who don’t read non-fic. So here are the non-fiction books that had the most impact on me in 2017:

1. Between the World and Me. A series of essays from the author to his son about life, race, and the US. If you read one non-fic this year, make it this one.
2. Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe. Even the most brilliant minds fail in big, big ways – but we are all better for it. Those failures build future successes.
3. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?: The Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. Are you a human? Do you ever talk to another human, personally or professional? You should read this. Funny, insightful, entertaining, and informative, Alan Alda’s book should be required reading for everyone.
4. From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives. Every piece of globalization, every thing that brought us all one step closer to the rest of the world, was driven by just one person at a time. These are their stories.
5. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Yes, it’s a book about cholera. But it’s also a book about emerging technologies in science, medicine, data analytics, and algorithms in the 1850s.
6. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”, says Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and he’s right – but through this book he certainly helps us understand it a little better.
7. On Trails: An Exploration. One of the things I commonly say about reading is that you can learn a lot more from a book than just its subject matter. This is true of The Ghost Map, certainly, but On Trails takes that idea and (trail) runs with it, drawing the reader along trails that connect not just two points in a wood but all of humanity and the world throughout time.
8. Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. LEGO almost went under. Massive change saved them. This book is full of amazing insights into innovation, change, leadership, marketing, and facing the unknown.

Honorable mentions, alphabetically:

• Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts. The epitome of “you can’t make this up because no one would believe it”. Not only is it all true, it happened not in the distant past but in the mid-1990s. It’s honestly just a third-party “no shit there I was” story.
• Death’s Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab ‘The Body Farm’ Where the Dead Do Tell Tales. If you’re interested in death, decomp, and related sciences, this is a highly entertaining read. If not? Give this a pass. (Did you know that you can go to the Body Farm when you die?!)
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Software, and Cities. Connection, decentralization, biology, and the amazing things we have to learn from ants – if you like seeing the pieces come together, read this.
• To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. Failure is not something to be avoided – it’s something to learn from. This is similar to Brilliant Blunders, but it’s written for engineers – so it’s quite dry, but still interesting.
• From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales. Adventuring through the forests of England with her son, the author explores how different types of forest influenced the fairy tales written about them, and offers fresh re-tellings of fairy tale classics. (Half non-fic, half fic.)
• Ghost Light. If you were a theater kid, read this book.
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for Machine Learning Will Remake Our World. Not a 101 book by any stretch, and not an in-depth course for someone already in the field, but if you have some tech background and are looking to better understand algorithms, this is a great option.
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Have you ever really thought about how something like the OED was created? Turns out, it was partially a crazy guy researching words from lockdown. No, really.
• Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found. Do you enjoy weird things, like severed heads? Do you like learning why other people enjoy weird things like severed heads? Read this.
• Ship It!: A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. Very, very dated – painfully so in places – but the basic tenets of software project management haven’t changed, and there’s a lot of solid advice here.
• Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent. A heart-wrenching peek into the soul of someone struggling with the illness of someone they love. (And, also, the history of Rent.)
• Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World. A look at how the act of playing – something we probably all need more of as adults – has surprising connections to our modern world, and how we might be served to look at play when we’re looking for the “next big thing”.