Award Winner Roundups
The Most Entertaining
Non-Fiction Books
Of The Past Decade
Every year since 2014, the Non-Obvious Book Awards have honored one book as the Most Entertaining Book of the Year: proof that non-fiction can be every bit as fun as it is smart. Collected here: every winner, in one definitive reading list.
*This list does not include books published in 2026, which are currently under review as part of our 2026 awards program.
The Future of Storytelling
by Charles Melcher
Charles Melcher charts how stories are evolving beyond the page and screen into immersive, interactive experiences that are rewriting the storyteller's craft.
Sticky Notes
by Matthew Eicheldinger
Teacher Matthew Eicheldinger's collection of funny, tender true stories from the classroom: the book behind the beloved viral videos.
The Theory of Everything Else
by Dan Schreiber
From the co-host of No Such Thing As A Fish, a joyful tour of the world's weirdest theories and the brilliant eccentrics who believed them.
Atlas of the Invisible
by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti
James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti turn overlooked data into breathtaking maps and graphics that make the invisible patterns of our world impossible to unsee.
Four Lost Cities
by Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz tours four vanished metropolises, from Çatalhöyük to Cahokia, to uncover why cities die and what our own urban future can learn from theirs.
Lurking
by Joanne McNeil
Joanne McNeil tells the history of the internet from the perspective that matters most and gets written about least: the user's.
Junior
by Thomas Kemeny
Thomas Kemeny's irreverent, genuinely useful guide to surviving and thriving in advertising: career advice that reads like entertainment.
The Formula
by Albert-László Barabási
Network scientist Albert-László Barabási reveals the universal laws behind success, and why performance alone is never enough.
Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy
by Tim Harford
Tim Harford spins the stories of fifty unlikely inventions, from barbed wire to the barcode, that quietly built the modern economy.
Disrupted
by Dan Lyons
Journalist Dan Lyons's riotous memoir of going from Newsweek to a tech startup at age 50: still one of the funniest and sharpest books ever written about startup culture.
Dataclysm
by Christian Rudder
OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder mines millions of data points to reveal who we really are when we think nobody's watching: funny, fascinating and occasionally alarming.
Keep Exploring
See every winner, every year.
Browse the full archive of winners, shortlists and 100-book longlists from every year of the Non-Obvious Book Awards.
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