I spent three years telling people I didn't like non-fiction. What I actually didn't like was a certain kind of airport business book that presents a single idea across 300 pages of case studies. That's not all non-fiction.

The books that converted me: The Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson), which is narrative non-fiction that reads like a novel with three protagonists. Say Nothing (Keefe), which is a true-crime investigation of an IRA disappearance that becomes something much larger. And The Botany of Desire (Pollan), which made me feel like I understood something about the relationship between human desire and plant evolution and I'm still not sure whether that's accurate.

The pattern is structure: these are non-fiction books that were written with a novelist's sense of scene, pacing, and withheld information. If you're a fiction reader who thinks you don't like non-fiction, start there.