10 (more) books that will get you ADDICTED to reading

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]You guys loved my video about 10 books that will make you addicted to reading.

[00:00:04]But one of the common comments that I got on that video was, "Where's all the non-fiction?" Because of the 10 books, there was only one non-fiction title in that list. And the whole point of that video wasn't to say that these were the best books I think I've ever read or books that I think everyone should read, but they were really books that I picked out that I thought were approachable, fairly easy to read and engaging to help people who maybe used to be readers but have fallen out of love with it, or people who like the idea of reading but just haven't landed on a book that's really sucked them in to find an entry point back into becoming a reader. And because most of my reading the last few years has been fiction, that is kind of what was on my mind for my picks. But for those of you who are more interested in non-fiction, I wanted to give you some recommendations as well. So, I've picked out 10 non-fiction books that I think also check a lot of those same boxes that I was looking for in my last video. Now, the tough thing about non-fiction is it's not a genre. It's a category or type of book. So, non-fiction titles can be even more broad than fiction books of different genres. So, there's a lot here. Not all of it might be for you, but that's okay.

[00:01:14]Hopefully, something on this list will peique your interest. You'll pick it up and you'll enjoy reading it. Now, the first book I want to talk about today is actually not in my physical stack. I don't know where my physical copy went, and if I don't mention this book first, I will forget to put it into the video.

[00:01:28]And that is Into Thin Air by John Crackour. I read this book many years ago, and I still think about it from time to time. I'm probably due for a reread. This was probably one of my first non-fiction books I've ever read in my life. And it just totally floored me. If you're not familiar with it, it's about Mount Everest and the disaster that happened there in the '90s with a terrible storm. And this was right during the time when climbing Mount Everest with guides was becoming very popular. And there were a lot of people that were paying to be guided up the mountain that probably shouldn't have been there. and a lot of competing companies that were all running separate businesses trying to best one another to get their group to the top at the right time and before others and it just was an absolute train wreck. Even if you're not into the outdoors, you're not into hiking, you're not into mountaineering, I think you will be very drawn in by this story because Crackour writes it in such a compelling way. It feels like fiction almost. And while we're on the topic of surviving extreme situations, I'll cover my next two recommendations that kind of fit into that category as well. The first one is In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philick. And this is all about the real life expedition that was loosely the basis for the story of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. This is about a whaling ship uh off the coast of Cape Cod and Nantucket. And basically, it was during a period where the waters had been wailed so heavily that ships had to go further and further and further away to try to continue to find whales to catch so they could melt them down for oil. And they go really far. I don't even actually remember exactly where they end up, but then their ship is attacked by a whale supposedly, and that causes some pretty extreme situations. Again, this is a non-fiction that has such a strong narrative. it really could be a fiction. It's just a very compelling book that is also uh very detailoriented and rich in history at the same time. One thing that I still think about to this day is they landed on an island that apparently no one had been to before or had charted before and then one of the crew members accidentally lets a campfire get out of control and it basically burns the whole island down and kills off this species of birds that only existed on this island. And the fact that humans went to this place for the first time and basically ruined it uh just never leaves my mind and just kind of makes you realize like the impact that humans have had on the natural world. And the last book that's kind of uh extreme elements themed is Endurance by Alfred Lancing.

[00:04:16]An absolute classic in this genre. This is about a 1915 expedition where they were basically going to try to traverse uh the length of Antarctica and the boat gets stuck in the ice and they're stranded out there and it's all about their struggle to survive in these very extreme conditions for a very very long time. The way that this book is usually kind of positioned is that it's an incredible story about leadership by Shackleton who is the uh commander of the mission. He's the guy that commissioned it and it was his kind of uh voyage that he was trying to do for glory. But more than anything else, I thought that this was a great story about the human spirit and the spirit of cooperation among people during very difficult times. Okay, making a big shift in gears, we have Scandals, Vandals, and Da Vinci by Harvey Racklin.

[00:05:05]This is a book all about some of the most famous works of art throughout history and some of the larger stories around them. I'm very ignorant to traditional art and I bought this book to kind of learn a little bit more about that world. What's really fun about this book is each chapter is just about a different piece of artwork. So, it's basically a series of short stories or essays, if you will. So, it's a great book if you want to just read a little bit at a time, put it down, maybe you're not going to pick up a book for a few days, and then you can come back to it, and you don't have to be worried about, I've forgotten where I'm at in the narrative or the history. So, every case is very isolated from one another. And obviously, some of the stories are a bit more interesting than others, but overall, it's a very entertaining read.

[00:05:51]There's a lot that goes into art history besides like this guy painted this thing on this date. Obviously, art has been a thing that's attached to wealth and scandals and theft and all these different interesting backstories that go around these pieces of art. You also get to learn a lot about world history through the art as well. So, even if you're not a fan of art, I think this is a very enjoyable read. Okay, these next two books are quite a bit different from each other, but they both tackle the kind of down andout fringes of society, the underbelly of society that we don't often like to take a look at, but I think have very compelling stories. This is The Cookup by D. Watkins, and the subtitle here is a crack rock memoir.

[00:06:36]So, this is all about this guy that grew up in Baltimore. He grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood. his older brother was involved with dealing uh crack cocaine and then he also got involved in it and it's about the obviously the trials and tribulations and dangers and lifestyle that goes into being a drug dealer and then eventually how he kind of got out of that mess. I don't want to say too much more about it cuz I don't really want to spoil it. I mean obviously this guy has put out a book at this point so you can kind of guess to the direction that his life took. But being from rural New Hampshire, this was pretty eye opening for me because it really, I think, exposed what life in the city for a lot of people can be like. Speaking of rural New Hampshire, we actually have the most motorcyclists of any state per capita, which meant that I was pretty familiar with the story in this book. And this is Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. This was his first book that he ever published and it's all about the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang which is probably the most infamous motorcycle gang uh that we've ever had here in the US. And Hunter S. Thompson pioneered this Gonzo style of journalism, which is where you aren't just sitting back and observing, you're actually inserting yourself into the story, which given how dangerous this gang was, particularly back when this book was written, was a pretty bold thing for him to do. And these aren't the type of people that are just going to accept anybody into their ranks. And it's uh yeah, it lives up to what you think it might be. It's incredibly well written, very engaging. If you're not at all familiar with motorcycle gangs, I think this will be a pretty eye- openening read for you. And it'll also be pretty fascinating just like how culture and society viewed these gangs during this time period. These next two are about war. I could have put a lot of books about war on this list, but I wanted to make it not just so one-dimensional. Uh, but this is Storm of Steel by Erns Younger, who fought in World War I. This is his World War I memoir. This particular Penguin Deluxe edition is just an absolutely incredible uh looking book. The graphic design on it is fantastic. Full disclosure, I actually didn't love this. I liked it better than some other famous World War I memoirs like Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, but I didn't like it as much as some other World War I themed books like All Quiet on the Western Front. But I still thought it was worth putting on this list because it seems like reader satisfaction for this one is pretty high. So even though I didn't love it, I thought it was okay. So many people that have read it rave about it.

[00:09:14]So I'll leave it up to you to decide if it's something you want to read. But it's incredibly detailoriented. It does make you feel like you are involved in the action. Obviously, World War I was one of the most brutal and bloodiest conflicts in human history. Uh Erns Younger, he fought for the Germans. Keep that in mind going into this book if that is something you want to read about or not. But interestingly, this guy also went on to write some fiction, which Robert Graves, who wrote Goodbye to All That, also did as well. So, I think it's interesting that two people who wrote World War I memoirs later became fiction writers. I haven't read any fiction from either of them, but I've heard good things about both of their works of fiction. And next is what I think is one of the best books ever written on the Vietnam War, and this is Dispatches by Michael Herr. This is effectively a collection of essays, although I don't know if that really does it justice.

[00:10:06]This is very literary in the sense that Michael her is a fantastic writer. He has a creative flare to his writing. And this is not the type of World War, excuse me, or Vietnam War book where it's like this happened, then this happened. It's it's not about military strategy or anything like that. It's really just about him getting inserted into this situation as a journalist and the absolute trauma that he experiences witnessing a lot of this stuff. What's very interesting about dispatches is Michael Herurr was there as a journalist which meant he was there voluntarily and so he was there amongst the Americans who were mostly there by the draft and people who didn't really want to be there and they actually held it against him in some uh instances that he had volunteered to be there. People had a hard time wrapping their head around I want to go home. You could go home anytime you want. why the are you here?

[00:11:07]So that added a very interesting dynamic to the story and it just makes you feel again like Storm of Steel that you're really inserted into this situation.

[00:11:17]It's uh one of the few books that kind of gave me a visceral response where my palm started to sweat a bit while I was reading it. These next two I would say are a little bit more like diaspora than anything else. There is some conflict involved in the narrative, but that's not the main feature. This first one is Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia.

[00:11:37]This is about the communist takeover in China uh from the nationalists in in Shanghai. And it follows the story of four different families of different political ideologies and classes, economic classes in China and how this changeover, this major changeover of government affects each of them with their political beliefs and their economic status. And it follows the families through a number of years. And this book has one of the most mind-blowing endings I think of any non-fiction that I've read. It's again very narrative-based. It could be considered like fictionesque, but it's all true stories, which makes it really interesting. And I just really enjoyed reading this one. The cool thing about it is because it has four different narratives, if if you start to get a little bit tired of one, it switches to another for a while and then back and forth. So, it is kind of an easy book to read all the way through without feeling too burnt out, even though it is almost a 500page book. Okay, the last book in today's list is the longest book and it's also maybe the driest, but I don't think that's like tells the whole story because I don't think it's dry. It's just maybe not as engaging as some of these others, but it's still absolutely worth a read and very fascinating. It's in the spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matias. Peter Matias was actually in the CIA, later became a writer. He wrote non-fiction and fiction. I have not read any of his fiction, but I've heard it's pretty good. But this is all about the American Indian movement in the 1960s and 70s and the famous case of when an FBI agent got shot on a Native American reservation. And so what was very fascinating to me about this book is at least through my education through elementary school and high school, the focus on anything related to Native American history was really about the uh pilgrims and very old antiquated history where this book is tackling the relationship between the indigenous peoples of the US and the US government in a much more modern time, which is something that I don't think just it doesn't get a lot of attention. So, one of the best things about the last video that I did was so many of you left comments giving other recommendations that people were able to find out about and find great books. So, please do the same. If you have any non-fiction recommendations that you think are great for getting people just sucked into the reading experience, please drop them below. And if you've read any of these, I would love to hear what you thought of