Thing Explainer (2015)

Randall Munroe sets himself an absurd rule, using only the ten hundred most common English words, and the constraint turns out to be one of the best teaching tools on this list. With no jargon to hide behind, a microwave oven, an airplane engine or the Saturn V rocket (drawn from NASA's own blueprints) has to be explained by what each part actually does. The labeled line drawings reward slow reading at a table. It is funny throughout, which keeps reluctant readers going, though adults who already know the proper terms sometimes find the word puzzles slower than a plain label.