A Non-Fiction a Month – 1 New Excellent Non-Fiction Every Month

A Non-Fiction a Month is a reading project for people who want to read more or at least one non-fiction book a month. I love non-fiction books, and whenever I read one, I promise myself to read more. After a while, I forget all about it and, end up rereading fiction. Don’t get me wrong; I love fiction! But, I think that non-fiction books are like superfoods for our brains, and we have to nurture them more often. Learning new things with books, especially if they are beautifully written, is a fascinating experience. I want to experience it more often. 

I’m really interested in the new non-fiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

David Shields

So I’ve decided to read at least one non-fiction a month from now on. To keep up with my reading, I’ve created this reading project so that you guys can discover fascinating non-fiction books and recommend me titles as well. I’ll try to read as diversely as I can. I’ll be reading memoirs, biographies, commentaries, diaries and a lot more! From travel writing to popular science and nature writing to psychology, there is a lot I’m eager to discover. I must say I will be reading a lot about art and artists’ lives. So stay tuned, and please share your favourite non-fiction books with me. 

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Looking for inspiration for a good non-fiction book?

If you are looking for inspiration, you can check out these fantastic lists and find a book that will pique your interest.
Modern Library 100 Best Non-fiction
Robert McCrum’s 100 best non-fiction books of all time
All-TIME 100 Non-fiction Books

Non-fiction Books

There’s nothing quite as exciting or moving as the very finest literary non-fiction.

Catherine Jinks

Biography

• Rumi: Past and Present, East and West – Franklin Lewis
• Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth – Catherine McIlwaine
• Will In The World – Stephen Greenblatt
• The Man Who Loved Books Too Much – Allison Hoover Bartlett
• J D Salinger: A Life – Kenneth Slawenski
• How to Live: A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
• Be More Keanu – James King
• Leonardo Portrait of a Master – Bruno Nardini
• The Man in the Red Coat – Julian Barnes

Memoirs, Autobiography

• Between the World And Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Blue Nights – Joan Didion
• Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain
• The Lost City of the Monkey God – Douglas Preston
• Woolgathering – Patti Smith
• M Train – Patti Smith
• The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
• Mom and Me and Mom – Maya Angelou
• A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
• A Woman in the Polar Night – Christiane Ritter
• Before Night Falls – Reinaldo Arenas
• The Cypress Tree – Kamin Mohammadi
• All My Cats – Bohumil Hrabal
• A Very Easy Death – Simone de Beauvoir
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – Barbara Kingsolver
• On Cats – Doris Lessing
• Dinner with Edward – Isabel Vincent
• Under the Tuscan Sun – Francis Mayes
• A Tokyo Romance – Ian Buruma
• This Road I Ride – Juliana Buhring
• Happy Fat – Sofie Hagen
• Borges and Me An Encounter – Jay Parini
• The Last Good Funeral of the Year – Ed O’Loughlin
• Days in the Caucasus – Banine
• Things I Didn’t Throw Out – Marcin Wicha

Nature Writing, Travel

• Full Circle: A South American Journey – Luis Sepúlveda
• A Year in Japan – Kate T. Williamson
• The Old Patagonian Express – Paul Theroux
• Walking With Plato – Gary Hayden
• 100 Things to Do in a Forest – Jennifer Davis
• I Love Dirt – Jennifer Ward

All About Food: Food Culture & Cookbooks

• Extra Virginity – Tom Mueller
• Food is Culture – Massimo Montanari
• Da Vinci’s Kitchen: A Secret History of Italian Cuisine
• Food The History of Taste – Paul Freedman
• Tequila Mockingbird – Tim Federle
• Turkish Cuisine in Historical Perspective – Deniz Gürsoy
• The Hemingway Cookbook – Craig Boreth
• The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book – Alice B. Toklas

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

Chuck Palahniuk

Popular Science, Environment

• Soil Not Oil – Vandana Shiva
• Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed – Vandana Shiva
• Slow Food Revolution – Carlo Petrini & Gigi Padovani
• Incognito – David Eagleman
• The Botany of Desire – Michael Pollan
• Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker
• The Way We Eat Now – Bee Wilson
• Morning – Allan Jenkins
• The Great Economists – Linda Yueh
• The Fate of Food – Amanda Little
• Ecovillages, New Frontiers for Sustainability – Jonathan Dawson
• Toolbox For Sustainable City Living – Stacy Pettigrew
• Islands of Abandonment – Cal Flyn
• When Strangers Meet – Kio Stark
• Adventures in Human Being – Gavin Francis
• Footprints In Search of Future Fossils – David Farrier

Health, Diet & Nutrition

• The Obesity Code – Dr Jason Fung
• The Complete Guide to Fasting – Jason Fung
• The Case for Keto – Gary Taubes
• Eat to Beat Disease – Dr William Li
• The Carnivore Code – Paul Saladino
• Exercised – Daniel E. Lieberman
• Food WTF Should I Eat? – Mark Hyman
• The Case Against Sugar – Gary Taubes
• The Plant Paradox – Steven R. Gundry
• Deep Nutrition – Catherine Shanahan
• The Mind-Gut Connection – Emeran Mayer
• Follow Your Gut – Rob Knight, Brendan Buhler
• Gut – Giulia Enders
• Genius Foods – Max Lugavere
• Eat Your Vitamins – Mascha Davis
• The Sirtfood Diet – Aidan Goggins
• Fasting Mother Nature’s Game Changer – Scott Murray
• Vitamins and Minerals – Mark Goldstein
• How We Eat with Our Eyes and Think with Our Stomachs
• How to Breathe – Ashley Neese
• How Not to Die – Michael Greger

Social Sciences, Current Affairs & History

• The Power of Myth – Joseph Campbell
• The Swerve How the Renaissance Began – Stephen Greenblatt
• Solitude: A Return to the Self – Anthony Storr
• Civilisations – Mary Beard
• Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
• Blue In Search of Nature’s Rarest Colour – Kai Kupferschmidt
• The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
• Blue The History of a Colour – Michel Pastoureau
• Rosa – Peter E. Kukielski
• The Beauty of Everyday Things – Soetsu Yanagi
• The Bells of Old Tokyo – Anna Sherman
• To See Clearly, Why Ruskin Matters – Suzanne Cooper
• Flaneuse – Lauren Elkin
• Empire of Pain – Patrick Radden Keefe

Essays, Criticism, Languages

• A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
• Women & Power: A Manifesto – Mary Beard
• On Art and Life – John Ruskin
• The Right to Be Lazy – Paul Lafargue
• On Writing – Stephen King
• In the Land of Invented Languages – Arika Okrent
• This is Not the End of the Book – Umberto Eco and J.C. Carrière
• Stop What You’re Doing and Read This – Mark Haddon
• Thank You for Not Reading – Dubravka Ugresic
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost – Rebecca Solnit
• Wanderers – Kerri Andrews
• Things That Are – Amy Leach
• Who Killed My Father – Edouard Louis

Philosophy

• The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work – Alain de Botton
• On Love – Alain de Botton
• Status Anxiety – Alain de Botton
• Conditions of Love – John Armstrong
• Travels with Epicurus – Daniel Klein
• Philosophy in the Garden – Damon Young

We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. 

David Shields

Inspirational, Reference, Other Misc.

• Bibliostyle – Nina Freudenberger
• 500 Essential Cult Books – Gina McKinnon
• A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind – Shoukei Matsumoto
• Ikigai – Hector Garcia Puigcerver
• Kaizen – Sarah Harvey
• The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo
• Goodbye Things: On Minimalist Living – Fumio Sasaki
• Remarkable Plants That Shape Our World – Helen Bynum
• The Art of Asking – Amanda Palmer
• Secret Lives of Great Authors – Robert Schnakenberg
• Lost in Translation – Ella Frances Sanders
• Dear Reader The Comfort and Joy of Books – Cathy Rentzenbrink
• Not Doing, The Art of Turning Struggle into Ease – Diana Renner, Steven D’Souza

If you are looking for non-fiction books about art and artists, check out Books About Art & Artists. I love reading about art and artists so they have their own page.