“There is no frigate like a book.”

~ Emily Dickinson, 1873

Recently, a fellow Journaly member asked me for non-fiction book recommendations. I’m posting the list here in case it might be of interest to others. Feel free to add your own recommendations in the General Comments below, and if you know of a similar Journaly post, please drop that in the comments as well.

The booklist below is organized loosely by category. For each book, a link is provided to an overview or review. Within categories books are listed in order from low to high Lexile measure (LS) and ATOS Book Level (BL) [link], when available. Unclassified books are listed at the end of each category. LS and BL scores can help identify books by reading level, from this booklist or elsewhere. Additional information about LS and BL scores, and links to online search engines that return LS and BL scores for given book titles, authors, or ISBN numbers are included at the end of this post.

If you’d like to better understand LS and BL scores, jump to the end of the post. Table 1 provides a rough guide to the reading level that corresponds to each of these two metrics, and Table 2 contains a list of fairly well known English books, along with their corresponding LS and BL scores, for comparison.

Art

• The Brilliant History of Color in Art by Victoria Finlay, (2014). LS: 1200L [link]

• Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, (2009). [link]

• Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere by Michael Kimmelman, (1998). [link]

Biography, Autobiography and Memoir

• Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, (1997). LS: 830L BL: 5.5 [link]

• Educated by Tara Westover, (2018). LS: 870L BL: 6.4 [link]

• The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, (1976). LS: 880L BL: 5.7 [link]

• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, (2005). LS: 1010L BL: 5.9 [link]

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, (1974). LS: 1040L [link]

• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, (1903). LS: 1090L BL: 6.8 [link]

• Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, (1996). LS: 1110L BL: 5.9 [link]
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, (2015). LS: 1130L BL: 7.5 [link]

• The Color of Water by James McBride, (1985). LS: 1140L BL: 6.1[link]

• Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, (2007). SL: NA BL: 6.9 [link]

• Always Another Country by Sisonke Msimang, (2018). [link]

• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, (2016). [link]

• The General’s Son by Miko Peled, (2012). [link]

• Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life, the Diaries by Etty Hillesum, (1996). [link]

• A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller, (1984). [link]

• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, (1964). [link]

Essays and Short Stories

• It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It by Robert Fulghum, (1991). BL: 5.7 [link]

• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, (1929). LS: 1150 BL: 8.2 [link]

• 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl, (2015). [link]

Food

• Taste Makers by Mayukh Sen, (2022). [link]

• How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons, (2007). LS: [link]

• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, (2000). [link]

History and Natural History

• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, (2010). LS: 1160L [link]
• Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical by Anthony Bourdain, (2001). BL: 8.5 [link]

• Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat, (1963). LS: 1330L BL: 8.9 [link]

• Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev, (2017). [link]

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, (2014). [link]

• The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King, (2013). [link]

• The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen, (2012). [link]

• Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, (2001). [link]

Philosophy

• Walking by H.D. Thoreau, (1851). LS: 1290L BL: 10.3 [link][Free eBook]

• The Philosopher Queens by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting, (2020). [link]
• Everything Is F*cked by Mark Manson, (2019). [link]

• Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, (2013). [link]
• I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, (2007). [link]

Psychology

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, (2013). [link]

• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (2012). LS: 1170L [link]

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, (2011). [link]

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, (1985). [link]

Science, Math and Medecine

• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, (2009). [link]

• My Brain is Open by Bruce Schechter, (2000). [link]

• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman, 1985. [link]

Travel

• Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, (1982). LS: 980L BL: 6.4 [link]

• Places in Between by Rory Stewart, (2005). LS: 980L [link]

• The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton, (2002). [link]

Writing

• Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, (2003). LS: 630L BL: 1.6 [link]

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, (2000). LS: 1110L BL: 7.4 [link]

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamont, (1995). [link]

A Lexile measure or LS, when applied to writing, is a measure of the text complexity of a book based on factors like vocabulary and complexity [link]. This online search engine returns LS scores for book titles, keywords, authors, and ISBN numbers.

The  ATOS Book Level (BL) evaluates a book based on factors such as average sentence length, average word length, and word difficulty level. The resulting number indicates a grade-level scale that specifies years-plus-months. For example, a BL of 6.3 indicates a typical primary school Grade 6 reader, 3 months into the school year [link]. This online search engine returns BL scores for a wide variety of input.

Table1 breaks reading ability into seven levels, from early primary school to post university, and provides the corresponding LS and BL scores for each reading level.

Table 1: A rough guide to Reading Level and the corresponding LS and BL Scores.

Of course, you can read any book at any difficulty level, and sometimes reading second-language books which are way out of your league, can still be beneficial. (Ask me how I know). I’ve provided LS and BL scores here as a rough guide to identify books at a given reading level, because that can help make reading more enjoyable. I suggest using them as a “rough” guide, because sometimes the LS and BL scores are widely divergent, most likely because they refer to different aspects of a book. See Table 2, Pride and Prejudice (line 5).

Table 2: Some widely read English books and their corresponding LS and BL Scores in order of increasing difficulty.

*NA; Not Available

Other (Stub: Title by Author, (year). LS: XXXX BL: XX [link])