The experience of reading a book that engages with your professional field is strange in a specific way. You're reading for pleasure but you keep hitting things that require your professional knowledge to evaluate, and that evaluation interrupts the pleasure-reading mode.

I work in a field adjacent to neuroscience, and reading Oliver Sacks creates this interruption constantly. I know enough to know when he's simplifying in ways that change the argument, but not enough to know whether the simplification matters for the larger point. This state of partial expertise is different from pure ignorance and also from full expertise.

The books I enjoy most in my field are the ones written by people who have the expertise and the literary ability simultaneously. These are rare. When they exist they produce the best non-fiction.