This year’s roundup of the best nonfiction of 2024 to inspire your reading list!
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I read 145 books in 2024: a new record! I finished out the year reading 26 nonfiction books.
My nonfiction preferences cover a few categories I love most:
- travel (big surprise)
- food (again, shocker)
- faith & Christianity (a big part of my life, so of course I read a lot about it!)
This year added pregnancy and parenting books to my wheelhouse. It feels so surreal to say that, even as I sit here getting kicked in the belly as I write!
I also moved back to the US this year, which meant I got some books out of long-term storage that I hadn’t seen in five years. So I’m currently reading a ton of older books from my TBR list that I bought or was given and never got around to. Moving around so much has made me re-evaluate my book buying in general, and I’m working to read and donate as much as possible!
Let’s dive in: these are the best nonfiction of 2024! I’m highlighting five this year: I don’t want to pick a top ten if I didn’t love all ten.
The Best Nonfiction of 2024
A Thousand Days in Tuscany, Marlena de Blasi
Unsurprisingly, I love Italy books, and A Thousand Days in Tuscany is no exception. Written as a sequel to A Thousand Days in Venice, it follows de Blasi and her Italian husband as they move to the Tuscan countryside to try life a different way. They immediately connect with their tiny town, integrating into lives and traditions dating back centuries.
The book follows them for a year. It meanders in the way life does naturally: without a defined ending or climax, but winding its way through the seasons, relationships, and choices we all see in our everyday lives. It’s a lovely book, somewhat escapism but without grandiosity.
Bringing up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, Pamela Druckerman
Bringing up Bebe is one of those books about being a parent that gets brought up early and often. But it’s not an instruction manual, which is part of why I loved it. It follows an American woman with a British husband living in Paris raising their first child. The crystalizing moment in the intro: French children don’t throw food or melt down in restaurants. How? Why?
Having lived in Italy for five years, I agree that there’s a very different approach to parenting in much of Europe. Kids are out and about on the parents’ terms, not as the stars of every interaction. I hope to bring some of that to my parenting style. While a part of me recognizes that it’s easier said than done to implement that once we get into the day-to-day grind of raising kids, I’m hopeful.
Taste: My Life Through Food, Stanley Tucci
I read this one in January, and I still think about it all the time! Taste is just plain fun. Listening to a food lover talk about food is such a pleasure, and listening to someone as funny and articulate as Stanley Tucci do it is even better.
Taste runs a wide range of topics. His Italian American childhood and the intrinsic role of food. What craft services defines as breakfast when on set in different countries. Some of the best meals he’s ever had, or made. How he fed his family of 8 through Coronavirus lockdowns while stuck in a London flat. The interactions of his cancer diagnosis with food.
Expecting Better, Emily Oster
Okay, a disclaimer on this one: I feel like the title is WAY more aggressive than the book itself is. The marketing department ran a little wild here. Author Emily Oster is a researcher, not a doctor. So when she got answers like “medically, we can’t say that alcohol at any level is safe for pregnancy,” she wanted to know what that actually meant. Does that mean one drop/glass been proven unsafe? What about in other cultures where they’re less strict about alcohol (or fish or raw food)? Does it mean it hasn’t been studied? Does it mean it hasn’t been studied well?
Along with the help of a doctor consulting on her writing, she looks at the studies that have actually been done on lots of different pieces of pregnancy advice, both medical and lore. I found Expecting Better to be so helpful to see this. She’s not pushing one conclusion on any of these topics unless there’s a clear reason (you know, like cocaine being bad for fetuses), leaving the reader to decide for themselves. But she presents what we know and what we don’t in a clear-headed way that’s such a gift to a pregnant woman trying to figure this stuff out without a medical degree!
Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging, Brennan Manning
This one is a reread, and it’s just as good as I remembered. Brennan Manning’s books are great, they approach faith as a relationship in such a deeply honest way. Abba’s Child offers the premise that at our core, we all crave belonging, and God offers that perfectly.
It feels risky to talk about faith given the current political climate. Much of American Christianity been aligned with a political ideology I outright reject. But I also believe that the faith I carry isn’t defined by American politics. What I believe is bigger and more beautiful than the hate that gets spread, and this book is a great example of that.
Looking for more? I’ve already shared my favorite fiction of 2024, or you can check the archive for all my best of lists!
