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Why You Should Read More Nonfiction in 2025
Books about our world and ourselves have so much to offer
Nonfiction — writing based on fact
Fiction — writing based on imagination
I fell into the nonfiction genre by accident when I was in college.
I was eighteen, living in the beautiful and chaotic city of Berkeley, browsing a local bookstore between city college classes and my job at a department store. My fingertips traced the spine of The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.
I picked it up, started reading the first page, and was hooked. Pollan’s immersive and extraordinary exploration of the history of plants that have changed civilization whisked me away — in his pages I was suddenly a botanist, a historian, an explorer.
How was it that nonfiction could be so compelling? I followed up with another novel-like exploration of botany, Susan Orlean’s exotic and thrilling book The Orchid Thief, which is about quirky people obsessed with orchids and their strange underground world.
Tasting these titles began my ravenous appetite for popular science books. Popsci is a genre written by scientists and science communicators for everyday people who don’t have PhD’s in an extremely specific…
