My Three Year Long Non-Fiction Reading List (150+ Books)
In order to be a good writer it goes without saying that one should ideally be an avid reader.
Unfortunately, over the past two years or so, the busy-ness of founding and running a full-time freelance writing business has insidiously but decisively monopolized my time.
If I haven’t been writing, I’ve been figuring out how to make the whole thing work — and I’ve learned that I’m far from alone in feeling like during the formative years of that process that there’s a lot to come to grips with.
If not that, then there’s always sales and marketing. And don’t forget tax compliance, invoicing, and back-office work (if only I weren’t the front office too!)
Thankfully, the coronavirus slowdown has given me a good excuse to dust off my Kindle and get stuck in to some excellent books. What else would I be doing on my weekend during lockdown?
And living in Israel — where English books are naturally not the norm and physical orders from overseas can still take weeks to arrive — Kindle e-books are definitely the way to go (its only downside for locals is that, as an electric device, it’s off-limits for the religiously observant on Shabbat and holidays).
To make up for lost time, I’ve set myself the goal of reading (at least) one book from this list a week.
And this is a non-fiction reading list because — to the chagrin of those close to me — I unfortunately gave up on reading fiction several years ago (ditto for movies and TV; if you’re thinking about asking me, you should probably find somebody else to go to the cinema with).
This list was compiled from browsing through the main non-fiction landing page in the Amazon Kindle Store and adding some supplementary finds from my friend, Peter Duffy’s, reading list. The former list, here, returns over 70,000 titles — I dug into the first 50 or so pages of results before calling it quits.
Some final notes about this selection:
- It does not contain non-fiction books in discrete areas which I regard as interesting but others probably do not (subjects in this bracket include content marketing, marketing, and advertising — as well as quite a long tail of other ones that have nothing to do with continuous professional development!). I keep these in more specific lists I maintain on Amazon.
- I did not set out to focus on mental health but — given how much wellness and psychology permeates this category — that genre, as well as business/leadership, is admittedly over-represented.
- I’ve steered away from narrow niches that aren’t of interest to me (US-specific books mostly)
- My main criteria when evaluating a potential non-fiction read, which has also informed the selection of this list, is: beyond the contents being interesting am I going to gain some actionable information by reading this book? If you’re concerned about optimizing your time, then actionable information helps yield a positive return on investment (ROI) on the considerable time it takes to read a full-length book. (I’ll read a biography or a history, for instance, only if I’m sure there’s a lot to be learned from that individual’s approach to life or that period in history— gleaning scintillating details about what happened ‘behind the scenes,’ at least for me, isn’t enough.)
Feel free to follow me on Goodreads.
And — as my non-affiliate marketing disclaimer usually goes — this list is shared in the simple pursuit of sharing information; therefore, none of the following links earn me any affiliate commission.
I hope there are a few items on my reading list that might be of interest to you too. Happy reading!
Interested in leveraging group accountability to make it through the list with other readers? Check out the ‘3 Year Non-Fiction Reading Challenge’ on Facebook:
(The books are ordered as I added them to my reading list, in reverse):
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