Book Advice just released a list of All-TIME Best Non-Fiction Books, and with 1142 of them listed you’d expect that just about every major author would be included. They’re rated, and the Top 10 feature some pretty heavy hitters:
- Essays by Michel de Montaigne
- Confessions by Augustine
- The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Pensées by Blaise Pascal
- The Republic by Plato
- The Complete Works of Plato by Plato
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Among fiction writers, Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own, 1929) placed the highest at #31, followed by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966, #42). Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast clocked in at #64, but you’d have to add a digit to that to get to Updike’s entry: Self-Consciousness (1989), at #638.