Welcome to the last week of Nonfiction November 2025. This week the host is Deb at Readerbuzz, and the prompt is 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!

In her roundup for the year, Shoe’s Seeds & Stories reminded me of Amy Tan’s Backyard Bird Chronicles. I must have read about that book on her blog last year, but I also listened to an NPR interview with her about the book. I still have that book in my pile, but Shoe also mentioned her memoir, The Opposite of Fate. I think I would like to read that.

In her roundup, Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best mentioned Hannah Kent’s memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, about falling in love with Iceland. I’m kind of fascinated by Iceland, and I loved Kent’s book set there, so I’m putting that one on my list.

On Books Please, I read about Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn, about what happens to places when they are abandoned by people. Sounds fascinating!

I noticed that Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden O’Keefe is mentioned by Anne in My Head Is Full of Books. This is another book in my pile that I think I read about last year but have not gotten to yet. So, not new to my TBR but waiting.

A memoir that looked interesting on Fanda Classic Lit was Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä, and it has a map on the cover! I love maps!

This book isn’t nonfiction, but Michelle Paver’s name has been popping up all over the place lately, so when Olivia of Bemused and Bookish paired it with a nonfiction book of exploration, I put Rainforest on my reading list. I didn’t put the nonfiction book on my list because I already read a similar book called The Lost City of Z by David Grann. Also, it has a great cover.

Also from Olivia’s post for book pairings is Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed & Stolen Work by Allison Tyra. As a woman whose work has been overlooked and misattributed, I think this will be interesting.

I think the Franklin Expedition is fascinating, and I have already read several books that are either about it or reference it, so when Aj Sterkel of Read All the Things posted Ice Ghosts by Paul Watson, I had to add it to my list.

Aj Sterkel also brought up Stiff by Mary Roach, which made me remember how much I enjoyed her book about space exploration, Packing for Mars. Learning what people have done with corpses throughout time sounds interesting. So, I put that on my list. And, by the way, Read All the Things also reminded me that I have not yet read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which I put on my list last year.

Joy of Joy’s Book Blog mentions The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, a book I read in 2015. This reminds me that I have not yet read Caste, by the same author, a book that I have had on my list since it came out. And she also reminded me of another book that I’ve had on my list for a while, Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan.

So, I’m cheating a little bit by mentioning some books that are on my TBR, but I have added quite a few this week.

For week two of Nonfiction November, the host is Frances at Volatile Rune. The prompt is Choosing Nonfiction: There are many topics to choose from when looking for a nonfiction book.  For example:  Biography, Autobiography, Memoire, Travel, Health, Politics, History, Religion and Spirituality, Science, Art, Medicine, Gardening, Food, Business, Education, Music.  Maybe use this week to  challenge yourself to pick a genre you wouldn’t normally read?  Or stick to what you usually like is also fine.  If you are a nonfiction genre newbie, did your choice encourage you to read more?

I’m not actively reading nonfiction this month unless something comes up in my pile. I usually use this month to read other people’s entries and get ideas for books to read in the future. I put a bunch of books on my To Read list last year, but so far, I have only managed to read a few of them. That doesn’t mean I don’t intend to read them.

As far as genres, although I tend to read mostly history and biography, particularly of literary figures, and a bit of true crime, I will read any topic if it seems interesting, even science, which in general I don’t have much interest in. About the only topics I won’t read are self-help and health, because I’m really uninterested in those topics. But psychology, for example, which is related, I find interesting. (I also won’t read business books, especially the “Ten Traits” type, because they are based on very little research and are generally stupidly thought through—and thank goodness, I’m no longer working.)

I thought I’d use this week to talk about some of the more unusual, for me, nonfiction books I read during the year. Unfortunately, I have only posted reviews of one of them so far.

Although I don’t tend to read about health, this year I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. Now, granted, this book is partially memoir, but it also has lots of information on food topics and the importance of eating fresh food. I actually read this book because it filled a hole in my A Century of Books project that I was trying to get done last year. (It came over into this year by four months!) That’s because, although I tend to like Kingsolver and think she has written wonderful books, she can also be preachy. And she is, a bit, in this book. But it also has lots of information about food topics I hadn’t thought about, includes a bit of memoir, and has tasty sounding recipes!

Now, I like books about maps and mapmaking. I don’t often see one, but I think books about mapmaking and the related subjects, geography and geology, can be interesting. I haven’t reviewed it on my blog yet, but one of my best books, whenever it comes up (it may not make it until next year) will be Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will by Judith Schalansky. This is a lovely book that I read about on someone else’s blog. I’d like to give them credit, but I can’t remember who they are. (I did a quick search hoping a familiar blog name would pop up, but it didn’t, although I saw lots of copies for sale on eBay, surprisingly.) This book is interesting not just because of the islands Schalanksy chooses to talk about but also because of the things she chooses to tell about them, including a topographical map, one story about each place, and the distance from other locations. This is probably the most unusual book about maps I have ever read.

Finally, another as yet unreviewed book for me is Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village by Mary Chamberlain. This is a sociology study from the 1970s, when feminism was just starting to make inroads in academia, but it was also the very first book published by Virago, and its reception was fairly astonishing, at least it would probably seem so to people nowadays. It simply interviews as many women in a small village in the fens as it can about their lives, their work, and so on. The updated version that I got includes an Introduction from 2010 that talks about what happened when it was published and includes about twenty pages of beautiful photos at the end.

I’m looking forward to getting new ideas for nonfiction this year.