Nonfiction November: Week Five

Here we are at the last week of Nonfiction November. The prompt for this week is

Week 5 (11/25-11/29) New To My TBR:  It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book! (Deb)

I have added a bunch of books to my TBR this week! Some of them were ones that I intended to put on it but forgot until reminded by a thoughtful blogger! Others are brand new to me. So, let’s go! I thought I’d divide these into books I already knew about and books I learned about this week.

Books I already knew about but forgot

Actually, a friend of mine recommended this book to me quite some time ago, and I forgot about it. So, when I saw it on Readerbuzz this month, I immediately put it on my list. Thanks Deb! It’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.

I’ve had my eye on A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan since it came out. Okay, I am interested in the history of fringe organizations. I’ll never forget reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Also, I found Egan’s book about the dust bowl to be interesting. Notice how I made no attempt to use this book’s really long and bulky subtitle. C’mon you guys! Some subtitle on a nonfiction book is expected, but you don’t have to tell everything on the cover! The blog that reminded me of this book was Joy’s Book Blog.

I didn’t write down which blog reminded me of Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, because it was mentioned on several. I have been meaning to read this book, especially because I thought Wilkerson’s book about the Great Migration was excellent.

One morning as I was driving to my art class, I heard an interview with Amy Tan. I didn’t know that she had been more or less restricted to her house because of a condition that causes her to faint with no warning. She told how she got interested in looking at the birds in her backyard and how she eventually trained some of them to eat from her hand. The book is also illustrated by herself! I made a resolution to get that book right away, but I forgot all about it until Shoe’s Seeds and Stories wrote about it this week.

Those are the books I knew about before, but look what I picked up this week!

Books that piqued my interest this month

These books appear in the order that I wrote them down.

What could be more exciting than the story of women in 1938 tackling the Colorado River to see what botanical specimens they can collect? They were expected to die! I found out about Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny on The Book Stop blog! Another unnecessarily long subtitle, guys.

I can thank Unsolicited Feedback for listing two books that I put on my TBR this year. One of them is Our Moon (long subtitle) by Rebecca Boyle. I’ve always liked the moon, and Boyle hooks it into effects on our intellectual development, science, and other topics.

The other book is Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin, illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. OK, I like birds. In this beautiful book, Unwin picks 80 birds from around the world and tells us all about them.

Thanks so much, Unsolicited Feedback!

This one looks like a page-turner, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan by Shrabani Basu. It’s about the first woman wireless transmitter in occupied France during World War II. She assumed a dangerous resistance post, was betrayed, and ended up dying in Dachau. I put it on my TBR thanks to Literary Potpourri!

And stepping back to World War I, Margot at War by Anne de Courcy is a biography of Margot Asquith, the wife of Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I and how she affected the office. This is a staid description, but this book with its examinations of the couple’s private lives sounds quite juicy! Thanks to Hopewell’s Library of Life for this suggestion!

Finally, thanks to Helen of She Reads Novels for just yesterday reviewing another true crime novel by Kate Summerscale, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. I have found Summerscale to be reliably good and interesting but didn’t know she had another book out. I like me a good true crime.

Last year, I listed six or seven nonfiction books in my TBR, but only managed to read three of them (along with nine others). This year, I’ll try to make a point of doing better.