Pretty much anything by Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens, Homo-Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Taken as a trilogy of sorts, they manage to do a great job of explaining how humanity got to where we are now, and assuming current trends continue, where we're headed in the future. All without being super dense and academic.

The first non-fiction book I read for fun is probably still my favorite. I used to hate nonfiction books, but randomly picked up Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident one day. A group of experienced mountain climbers died on a Russian mountain in very mysterious circumstances, leading to all kinds of wild theories from the KGB to the supernatural.

The author essentially becomes a detective, and the book alternates between his experience piecing together the mystery and the journal entries of the group that died. It’s fascinating and was impossible to put down.

It sparked my love of non-fiction and I have since read dozens of others. I left the book a glowing review on goodreads and the author actually liked my review, I fangirled for a bit ngl.

My favorites that I re-read often, actually re-listen on audiobook (shout out libro.fm) are A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster both by David Foster Wallace. I find his writing to be funny, erudite, and addictive. It's like hearing someone else's conversation with their brain.

Honorable mention goes to Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb. One of those books that makes you look at the world differently when you finish.

Recently finished The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, a biography of John von Neumann and it was fascinating to hear his impact on so many different fields, e.g. mathematics, the atom bomb, the first computers, game theory, and automata. And all the secondary characters could be subjects of equally fascinating books themselves, e.g. Teller, Oppenheimer, Turing, Gödel, Einstein, Nash, etc.