Ask HN: Best non-fiction book you read in 2024?

I think I suffer from aphantasia which may be related to the impossibility of getting hook to anything by reading. I've tried mangas as well and it's a bit easier, but still find hard to really enjoy.

Of course, most of the books I tried are the ones that I had to read in school, but I also tried a few recommendations from friends and the result was the same.

It makes me a bit sad.

As an Indian, I found how civilizations treat luxury (flowers) and necessity fascinating. Apparently Europe had a culture of garlands before the banquet culture. India is still predominantly garlands expect for a few highly westernised places. Muslim treatment or rather rejection of flowers in mosque but giving the world spectacle of flower gardens was very fascinating.

The book is not going to win any prize for prose or even coherence structure.

If you liked this one as an against the odds shipwreck survival story, David Grann’s The Wager is also very good.

"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. This is an old one, but still a classic. The first half is like a scientific detective story about the discovery and development of quantum theory itself, in Germany and Denmark, and can be read by itself as an engaging history of physics. Then Hitler rises to power, we learn how most of the characters we've met so far escape to England and the USA, and the others except Bohr become part of the German nuclear project. It then becomes an engineering management history of the Manhattan project, and a fascinating look at the challenges they overcame. The final chapter is a sobering play by play description of what happened to the people of Hiroshima, and was hardest but necessary to read.