I want to make the case for reading nonfiction with the same attention and annotation you'd give to fiction. The argument in a work of history or science writing is not so different from the argument in a novel — it's developed over time, it uses narrative and evidence rather than character and scene, but it's asking a question and building toward a conclusion.

The best nonfiction I've read taught me this: Seamus Heaney's essays in Preoccupations, which are about poetry and reading but are written with a novelist's care for individual scenes. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is formally very close to a collection of lyric essays. And Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which defies easy category.

These books reward the same slow reading that poetry rewards. They're not efficient. They're not summarizable. The value is in the reading, not the take-away.