Best non-fiction books to read first, by what you want to learn

The picks

1. 1.

   Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman

   Best for anyone tired of productivity adviceAbout 280 pages, roughly 5 h 24 min

   Burkeman starts from a plain number: if you live to 80, you have just over 4,000 weeks. The publisher’s page describes it as a guide to embracing your limits instead of trying to do the impossible, and to getting meaningful things done within them.

   Good

   • The shortest on the list
   • One clear idea you can test the same week

   Watch out for

   • Gives a way of thinking, not a system or a list of steps

2. 2.

   The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel

   Best for understanding why people do what they do with moneyAbout 288 pages, roughly 5 h 33 min

   The book argues that doing well with money depends less on what you know than on how you behave. It makes the case through 19 short stories rather than formulas.

   Good

   • Short chapters you can read one at a time
   • About behavior, so no finance background is needed

   Watch out for

   • A way to think about money, not a plan with numbers for your own budget

3. 3.

   The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

   Best for a true story about science, race and medical ethicsAbout 336 pages, roughly 6 h 28 min

   Henrietta Lacks was a poor tobacco farmer whose cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951, became one of the most important tools in medicine. The author’s page calls the book a story of the collision between ethics, race and medicine, and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

   Good

   • A narrative, so it reads like a story rather than a lecture
   • Puts the science and the ethics in one human story

   Watch out for

   • Not a how-to book; you take away questions, not steps

4. 4.

   Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

   Best for the long view of human historyAbout 456 pages, roughly 8 h 47 min

   Harari argues that Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights. He retells the history of our species from that starting point.

   Good

   • Retells the history of the species in one narrative
   • Wide sweep gives you a map of many topics to read on

   Watch out for

   • Covers a very long span, so each topic gets a short treatment
   • Long enough to take weeks at 20 minutes a day

5. 5.

   Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

   Best for understanding how your mind makes judgments and mistakesAbout 528 pages, roughly 10 h 10 min

   Kahneman describes two systems of thought, a fast intuitive one and a slower deliberate one. He says systematic errors, which he calls biases, recur predictably in particular circumstances, and he wants readers to have words for them.

   Good

   • A vocabulary for talking about decisions with others
   • Its author won the Nobel Prize in Economics, per the publisher’s page

   Watch out for

   • The longest on the list

How we chose: We picked five books that answer five different questions, so the list is not a flat top 100, and ranked them from shortest to longest, because the first book you finish matters most. Habit and focus books are left to our best self-help books list. Descriptions come from each author’s or publisher’s own page, and page counts from Open Library, which lists the median page count across editions, so your edition will differ. Reading time is pages times 275 words a page, divided by 238 words a minute, the average silent reading speed for adult non-fiction in a 2019 review of 190 studies. Descriptions are the authors’ and publishers’, not our own review. IQumi is made by Lucernel, the publisher of this site, and is not one of the picks.