People who say they hate reading usually mean they hate the experience they have had with books — which is often books assigned in school, books that started slowly and never recovered, or books that felt like obligations. The fix is usually not to explain the value of reading but to give them a book that doesn't feel like work. Short, specific, urgent, and impossible to summarize by someone who hasn't read it — those are the qualities you are looking for.
John Hersey's Hiroshima is one of the best books to give someone who hates reading because it is 150 pages and it reads like a news story that keeps escalating. Hersey went to Hiroshima a year after the bomb, interviewed six survivors, and wrote their accounts with such restraint and precision that the effect is overwhelming without the author ever raising his voice. The book took up an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946; readers wrote in afterward saying they had never read anything like it. It is still the clearest account of what nuclear weapons actually do to actual people, and it is readable in an afternoon. The narrative history shelf at byallo carries it.
Dava Sobel's Longitude is the short book that turns the problem of finding your position at sea into a story about obsession, institutional politics, and one man's extraordinary persistence. John Harrison spent decades building clocks precise enough to solve a problem that had defeated every approach for centuries, while the scientific establishment ignored him. The book is 175 pages and reads as fast as a thriller, because the problem and the person are both genuinely interesting. For non-readers who say they only read nonfiction, this is usually the first successful conversion. The narrative history shelf at byallo carries it.
James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is two essays, together running about 100 pages, and it is the book that is most likely to make a non-reader forget they are reading. Baldwin's prose has an urgency and a specificity that makes everything else feel tentative by comparison. The argument is about race and America, but the experience of reading it is the experience of being addressed by someone who is being completely honest with you about something that matters. People who have never read an essay have read this one in a single sitting. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries it.
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is another short book — 165 pages — that non-readers often finish in one or two sittings because the stakes are too high to stop. Frankl's account of surviving four concentration camps is not a horror story, though what he describes is horrific; it is an account of what kept him alive and what broke others, and the theory he developed from that experience. The second half of the book, which explains the theory, is harder going for some readers, but the first half reads as directly as memoir can. The philosophy shelf at byallo carries it.
Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus is the short philosophical essay that reads more like a provocation than an academic text. Camus begins with the assertion that the only serious philosophical question is whether life is worth living and proceeds with a clarity and directness that academic philosophy rarely permits itself. For non-readers who are willing to be challenged but not to be bored, this essay — 120 pages — is the entry point to serious philosophy that doesn't require a philosophy degree. The philosophy shelf at byallo carries it.
Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is the book that converts people who think they dislike nonfiction because it isn't as propulsive as fiction. Macdonald's account of training a goshawk after her father's death is simultaneously a grief memoir, a natural history, a meditation on T.H. White, and a falconry manual — and it moves with the focused intensity of someone who needs to talk about something and has found exactly the right oblique angle from which to approach it. For people who say they can't get absorbed in nonfiction, give them this one and see what happens. The nature writing shelf at byallo carries it.
The common thread in all these books: they are short enough that a non-reader can finish them, specific enough that they don't feel like they are covering ground the reader already knows, and direct enough that they don't feel like work. The narrative history, essays and memoir, and philosophy shelves at byallo carry all of them.