What is your favorite non-fiction book that you've read in 2023?

Looking for some new non-fiction book ideas, I really liked Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli and Fatal Conveniences by Darin Olien.

Just inserting touchstones for the books you mentioned -

Stolen Focus
Stop reading the news
Fatal Conveniences

On those lines, I enjoyed The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is.

A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht. It’s probably the best autobiography I’ve ever read.

2023 was the year I discovered David Graeber. Excellent books to make you see things you thought you knew in a completely different way. Very thoroughly researched.

Easiest to read was Bullshit jobs on the proliferation of jobs without meaning, next Debt on what money really means and how we could use it differently, and finally the very academic The dawn of everything (with David Wengrow) about how different societies have been organized in prehistory.

Lady Justice which is helpful to understanding the wave of women, party notwithstanding, that is coming together to fight for freedom in the USA.

Just finished Helen Czerski's Blue Machine, an absolutely thrilling work about the structures and processes of the ocean, and the intricacy of human connectivity to this massive part of our environment.

I can recommend Out of Office and The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls. I'm about to start Lay Them to Rest.

My favourite so far this year is Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig.

My top three nonfiction books ever are (in no particular order):

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed by John Vaillant

This year (so far), my favorite, hands down, is Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson.

>9 LynnB: I loved! Eig's book on the pill - so interesting!

My favorite was The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet. It's a really great book with some fantastic characters.

I also read Planet Dora: A Memoir Of The Holocaust And The Birth Of The Space Age this year which is a book I think about all the time. Horrific.

The Luckiest Man: The Life and Death Of Lou Gehrig by Jonathan Eig

Enough
by Cassidy Hutchinson

and

I am looking forward to reading Liz Cheney's book early next year.

barbra

I read A History of Reading this year and that was a highlight for me. (Inexplicably, I had avoided it. And that was a mistake.)

These were my favorites this year:

Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King
What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullen
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

Music : A Subversive History was the can't put down book. Great different perspective that I have not read before.

I also loved Stop Reading The News but haven't read anything similar this year to recommend. I did do a 10 day vipassana course that helped me take back my focus, I can highly recommend that.

>18 zetetic23: I'm happy but not surprised to read your positive comments about the Gioia book. His The History of Jazz is superb, though, as it was first published in 1997, may be a bit dated by now. I read it only a few years after it's arrival.