Here are our reading groups’ favorite nonfiction books of 2024 based on our survey results.
10% HAPPIER
Dan Harris
Dan Harris always believed the restless, relentless, impossible-to-satisfy voice in his head was one of his greatest assets. How else can you climb the ladder in an ultra-competitive field like TV news except through nonstop hand-wringing and hypervigilance? For a while, his strategy worked. Harris anchored national broadcasts, he covered…
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
David Grann
At the end of the 19th century, the Osage Indians were driven onto a presumed worthless expanse of land in northeastern Oklahoma. But their territory turned out to be atop one of the largest oil deposits in the United States; to obtain that oil, prospectors were required to pay the…
ALL IN HER HEAD
Elizabeth Comen, MD
A surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women’s bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around women’s health. For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined…
CASTE
Isabel Wilkerson
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight…
THE DARK QUEENS
Shelley Puhak
The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule. Brunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave.…
MAD WIFE
Kate Hamilton
In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost. In the tradition of Know My Name…
NEARLY DEPARTED
Gila Pfeffer
A heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of losing both parents to cancer and making daring choices to avoid the same early demise. By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family. A blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene—which put her at high risk…
THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS
Michael Finkel
A National Geographic Best Book of the Year National Bestseller Many people dream of escaping modern life. Most will never act on it—but in 1986, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight did just that when he left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the woods. He would not have a conversation…
UNCOMMON MEASURE
Natalie Hodges
A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming How does time shape consciousness and consciousness, time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time?…
WILLKIE SPRINT
Kerry Hellmuth
In the triumphal spirit of Breaking Away comes the unforgettable true story of the first women's Little 500 race at Indiana University. In 1987 four young women from different walks of life enrolled at Indiana University. No one knew that these four freshmen would defy the odds and go down…