Any retrospective on the 2020s faces the problem that the decade is still happening. But the first five years have already produced a body of nonfiction that will last — books that arrived at exactly the right moment and that will still be worth reading when the moment has passed. The following is not a comprehensive survey; it is a selection of books that made a real argument or told a real story in ways that seem likely to hold up.
Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain (2021) is the most important work of investigative narrative published in the decade so far: a full account of the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, and the opioid crisis. Keefe spent years on the research and the result reads like a novel — character-driven, propulsive, full of specific detail — while documenting one of the most serious public health catastrophes in American history and the family and company at its center. The book is a model of investigative nonfiction: it is not satisfied with the institutional record but pursues the human decision-making that the institutional record tends to obscure. Keefe's earlier Say Nothing (2019, late in the 2010s) — about the murder of Jean McConville during the Troubles in Northern Ireland — is equally accomplished and demonstrates his method more concisely.
Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) makes a philosophical argument in the form of self-help, and it is one of the most honest books in the genre: the argument is not that you can do everything if you organize yourself correctly, but that you can't, and that the management literature's promise of complete control over your time is both false and psychologically damaging. Burkeman draws on Heidegger, on ancient philosophy, on psychology, on the history of timekeeping, to argue that a finite life is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be accepted — and that accepting it, rather than fighting it, is what allows you to actually live the life you have. The philosophy shelf at byallo carries Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as the earliest and most sustained version of the same argument: writing to himself about the brevity of life, the necessity of attention, the discipline of returning to what actually matters.
Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart (2021) is the decade's best memoir so far — an account of her Korean American mother's death from cancer and the role that Korean food played in their relationship and in Zauner's grief. It belongs to the tradition of grief writing at its most specific: the argument is not about grief in general but about this particular mother-daughter relationship, this particular food culture, this particular loss. Zauner is the vocalist and songwriter for the band Japanese Breakfast, and her writing has the same quality her music does — emotionally direct without being sentimental, rooted in specific sensory detail. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking as the most precise earlier treatment of grief as a cognitive event; Crying in H Mart is its natural contemporary companion.
Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019, though its cultural moment was distinctly the early 2020s) makes the case that attention is a resource that can be invested or squandered, and that the default conditions of contemporary digital life systematically squander it. Odell's argument is grounded in natural observation — she is an amateur birder, and the book begins with an account of learning to see birds in a specific patch of Oakland — and it is that groundedness that distinguishes it from more abstract versions of the attention-reclamation argument. The book connects, unexpectedly, to the nature writing tradition: Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Baker's The Peregrine on the nature writing shelf are both arguments for sustained attention as a practice, made in prose rather than in an essay about attention.
Ed Yong's An Immense World (2022) is popular science at its best: an account of how different animals perceive the world — how bats navigate by sound, how birds see magnetic fields, how dogs process smell — that functions as an argument about the limits of human perception and the strangeness of the actual world we inhabit. Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2021 for his COVID-19 coverage; An Immense World shows the same quality of scientific understanding applied to a longer-form project. It belongs on the same shelf as Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — both books approach the strangeness of perception with clinical precision and humanizing care. The mind and behavior shelf at byallo carries Sacks alongside other writers in that tradition.
Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head (2015, slightly before the decade) and his more recent Why We Drive (2020) both make an argument about embodied cognition — the idea that intelligence is not a purely mental phenomenon but is distributed through the body and its relationship to material reality. Crawford, who holds a philosophy PhD and runs a motorcycle repair shop in Virginia, is interested in what skilled manual work reveals about what a mind actually is. His books belong to a tradition of philosophy done through practice rather than abstraction, and they connect unexpectedly to Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the philosophy shelf — the same question (what does good work require?) approached from the same angle (the motorcycle as philosophical occasion).
The decade's nonfiction landscape is large and includes a great deal of forgettable material. The books above share a quality that is rarer than it appears: they are each doing something the author understood as important before the culture told them it was, and the ideas survive being simplified and shared in a way that distinguishes them from books that existed primarily to ride a wave of topical interest.