Ask a Book Critic: How do I get back into reading after a break?

Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here.

Hi! I’m a little embarrassed to say, but I recently got back into reading after a long time. My re-introduction was through fantasy books (I know, please don’t judge me), but I want to read nonfiction, to be more aware of what is happening in the world, and why things are the way they are, but don’t know where to start. Thank you!

First of all, there’s no need for embarrassment on any of this. Lots of people go for long stretches without reading — it happens! The world is a busy place filled with lots of distractions, and I don’t think you need to feel awkward or ashamed for having taken a break. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with reading fantasy books, which, after all, only means that you’re reading a genre as old as storytelling. Personally, if I wanted to read more books to understand the world, I could do way worse than a little Ursula K. Le Guin.

But you asked for nonfiction. So! Probably the best American historian when it comes to writing for lay people is Harvard professor Jill Lepore, whose work you might recognize from the New Yorker. Her book These Truths: A History of the United States is a narrative history that starts in 1492, ends in 2016, and stretches across nearly a thousand pages in the process. Don’t be intimidated by its length: It’s a rich, readable history that goes out of its way to center women and people of color in the vast contradictory machinery of the American experiment.

If you’re interested in learning more about what happened to North America from a Native perspective, let me point you toward The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk, a Yale historian. Blackhawk puts Native people at the center of American politics from 1492 through the 21st century. His central question is, “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?”

Finally, let’s go back before all that to 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by George Washington University archaeologist Eric H. Cline. Also extremely readable, this book focuses on a series of catastrophes that hit the eastern Mediterranean over the 12th century BCE, causing multiple great civilizations to shudder and, for some, collapse. Invasion, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts: the Minoans of Crete and the Babylonians of Mesopotamia crumble and fall, and Pharaonic Egypt shakes. This book has become increasingly popular amid the global instability of the last few years, and it might help you think through the way civilizations have failed before and can do so again.

Would like a recommendation for a science fiction or science/space-focused nonfiction book!

The strangest and most beautiful book about science and space I’ve come across in the last few years is Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. Labatut is interested in the 20th century’s breakthroughs in theoretical physics, and he excels at evoking the cosmic horror embedded in an idea like a black hole, which he describes as a point where “the equations of general relativity went mad: time froze, space coiled around itself like a serpent.” This book is part novelistic history account and part philosophical treatise, and all of it is beautiful.

Hi there! I’m looking for a realistic heist novel with all the twists and turns the cinematic versions offer. I want all the tropes: a motley gang of likable and honorable thieves, chases, plot twists, etc. I love the movie genre and would like to escape in the genre with a different medium. I’m not opposed to fantasy/sci-fi settings. I have enjoyed The Six of Crows and The Lies of Locke Lomara, but I think I’d prefer something more grounded in reality. Thanks!

What you want is Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. They’re heist novels from the point of view of the fence — in this case, Ray Carney, a Harlem furniture seller who considers himself to be not really crooked, only “slightly bent.” Via his very crooked cousin Freddie, Ray finds himself enmeshed in a plot to rob a hotel known as the Waldorf of Harlem, a plan that goes off with more than a few twists. These books are playful, stylish, and gorgeous to read.