If you're not interested, your brain will come up with thousands of excuses to avoid something you don't enjoy and you won't be able to fight back. I mean, if Sapiens can't keep you entertained, then I don't know what can. You can find other mediums to expand your knowledge: documentaries, YouTube, podcasts, articles or audio books. You can read fiction and learn about this world some other way, it's fine.

Focus on why you want to (want to) read them - what about it interests you? If you can try to boil that interest down to a few questions, that'll give you something to be on the lookout for, which might help you stay alert.

Be "mindful": if you feel your attention slipping, just sort of "notice" that it's happened, without emotion or judgment, acknowledge what distracted you and then go back to it.

Try to make a specific effort to "do something" with the text you're reading - read out loud, visualize or sketch, rephrase/summarize when writing notes, mindmap... whatever works and might engage some different parts of the brain.

I put them in the toilet and I really take their "shit book" nature seriously. Somehow, it works.

Use your finger to follow along! It sounds childish, but there's a reason children do it, because it's an easy way to boost comprehension and reading speed.

I also use audiobooks to listen while I read, for particularly challenging stuff.

Besides that, just practice. If something is too hard, ease into it with something a little easier. Reading is just like any other skill, you have to practice it and get better. Try harder and harder things to train your muscles.

Find a reason to want to read before you start.

Read favorable and unfavorable reviews until you feel the urge to make up your own mind. Do enough background research to form a preliminary opinion of your own, then see if the author’s reasoning matches yours. Get two books on the same subject, and switch whenever you start to get bored; then compare their approaches.

In general, approach nonfiction not as information to passively absorb, but as an argument someone is trying to persuade you of.

I can relate to this. I have a hard time with many books even if I am interested in the subject; interesting content doesn't mean that that content is easy to get through or engaging throughout.

I usually read a few things at a time and I'll often choose these types of books to listen to when I'm doing chores and errands. I might not feel motivated to sit down and give the book my full attention, but I can handle an hour or two of passive listening. The downside of having my attention split is that I will definitely miss things and have to pause and go back, but that doesn't frustrate me nearly as much as when I'm fully concentrating and still find myself rereading the same paragraph without absorbing anything. It might take me several hours to listen to a book that should theoretically take me half the time to read, but in the end I'd rather have finished the book however long it took! This doesn't work for highly technical books where you really need to have the text in front of you the entire time, but I haven't had problems with the type of non-fiction you've mentioned.

Another thing that really helps me is having the book in both text and audio formats. I'm able to retain the information much better if I listen and later skim through the text I covered to note what stuck out to me. It's a bit of a waste of library check-outs, but having the ability to switch between formats helps me get through the material faster. It sounds like a chore but it doesn't actually take much time to do.

Lastly, sometimes I do just lean into the "boredom" and read a little before bed since there's no risk that I'll binge the book and stay up all night.

It sounds like you're already doing a lot of this (audiobooks, notes) so if that's the case, I guess the main thing that helps me and might hopefully help you is just being okay with the glacial pace and extra effort?

This is why I like having ebooks. I have them on my phone and I find that I might be more able to read something heavy on a lunch break at work than before I go to bed at night.

Generally though I've been having the opposite problem - I can't get into fiction at the moment, nothings grabbing my attention although I did read Yellowface which was excellent