I analyzed 70+ Reddit threads to find the 680 most recommended non-fiction books (with sentiment analysis)

I extracted comments from 70+ Reddit threads (many from this subreddit) discussing non-fiction book recommendations and ranked them by sentiment analysis.

Key finding: "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari dominated with a 99/100 score, followed closely by classics like "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (98/100) and "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (97/100). Some popular titles had surprisingly mixed reception due to debates about accuracy or writing style.

Obviously "most recommended" is not "best for everyone". Different readers have different interests and learning styles. But if you're overwhelmed by endless book lists and want to cut through the noise, this gives a helpful starting point on Reddit sentiment, based on thousands of comments.

The top 30 Non-Fiction books by reddit score:

1. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari (99/100)
2. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – Jared Diamond (98/100)
3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot (97/100)
4. Educated – Tara Westover (97/100)
5. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood – Trevor Noah (96/100)
6. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – John Carreyrou (96/100)
7. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer – Siddhartha Mukherjee (96/100)
8. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman (95/100)
9. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History – Elizabeth Kolbert (95/100)
10. When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi (95/100)
11. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America – Erik Larson (95/100)
12. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption – Laura Hillenbrand (94/100)
13. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster – Jon Krakauer (94/100)
14. A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson (94/100)
15. The Wright Brothers – David McCullough (94/100)
16. The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – Daniel James Brown (93/100)
17. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (93/100)
18. Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl (93/100)
19. The Gene: An Intimate History – Siddhartha Mukherjee (93/100)
20. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage – Alfred Lansing (92/100)
21. The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins (92/100)
22. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg (92/100)
23. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear (91/100)
24. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari (91/100)
25. The Body: A Guide for Occupants – Bill Bryson (91/100)
26. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker (90/100)
27. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics – Tim Marshall (90/100)
28. The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson (90/100)
29. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI – David Grann (90/100)
30. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race – Walter Isaacson (90/100)

How I did this:

• Scraped 70+ non-fiction book discussion threads from Reddit (many of those had 300+ comments – so a lot of data)
• Used LLMs (GPT-4, Gemini 2.5) to extract nonfiction book mentions and run sentiment analysis
• Ranked using weighted scoring: difference between positive/negative mentions (70%) + ratio of positive to total mentions (30%)
• Manually cleaned up title variations and author name inconsistencies

This approach prevents books with tons of discussion but polarized opinions from ranking artificially high.

The full list of 680 books (with individual comments, book summaries and sentiment scores) is way too large to post here, but you can find it at: RedSummary (dot) com/best-non-fiction-books-of-all-time

Would love to get any feedback and hope this can help you on your nonfiction reading journey!