Tag: nonfiction

Nonfiction November 2025! Week Five: New to My TBR

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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.

Nonfiction November 25! Week Two: Choosing Nonfiction

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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.

Nonfiction November 2025! Week One: My Year in Nonfiction

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Hi, all, it’s November, so it’s time for Nonfiction November, which I participated in the last two years. This year, it is hosted by the following bloggers:

Each week, the host posts a prompt for discussion and a linkup where you can link your posts. For this first week, the host is Heather at Based on a True Story, and the prompt is Your Year in Nonfiction. For more information about the prompt, see Heather’s blog. And here we go for mine.

What Did I Read?

Since November 2024, I read 16 books. I think this means that I have increased my nonfiction reading in number by one each year that I participated until now, when I went up by four (but I am not sure if I included the two books I read in November 2024 in my count last year—probably not). Last year I didn’t list them all, just totaled them by category, but sixteen isn’t so many, so I may as well, in the order that I read them. If I have reviewed them yet (I am behind posting), there’s a link to the review.

As far as categorizing them, here goes:

  • Biography/Memoir: 10
  • Art and Language: 3
  • History: 4
  • Sociology: 1
  • Sports: 1
  • Food: 1
  • Science: 1
  • True Crime: 1
  • Maps: 1

Clearly, some of these fit into more than one category. The hardest to categorize are Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I have put under memoir but is as much about the importance of good food, and Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, which I have not put under memoir, even though it includes lots of anecdotes, but under art and language, because it’s mostly about interpreting Shakespeare’s plays (which sounds dull, but it is not).

Just as a side note, when I look at my record of nonfiction reading from the past year, I see that I seriously went into it in the spring, reading half a dozen books between February and April, then sort of fell off for the summer, and picked up the pace a bit in the fall.

What Were My Favorites?

If I go by my ratings, my favorites were Life Among the Qallunaat, The Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, and Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. However, hands down, the one that made the most impression on me was Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands. I’m sorry, therefore, that I haven’t reviewed it yet. (It’s going to be a Best of Ten, which I tend to save up so as not to have too many in a given period, so I may not get to my review this year, because there are a bunch ahead of it.) I believe I read about it during last year’s Nonfiction November. Other books I read about last year were Cultish and Mad Madge (I think).

What Were My Favorite Topics?

Well, obviously and always, I like reading about people and history. I didn’t read anything this year that I wanted to follow up on, although I like to read about indigenous people, so probably will.

What Am I Hoping to Get Out of Nonfiction November?

Since I’m not a big nonfiction reader and don’t tend to read many blogs that focus on it, I hope to add a few more interesting books to my To Read list.

Review 2636: The Art Thief

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The Art Thief is a nonfiction book about the most prolific art thief ever known. Stéphan Breitwieser, aided by his girlfriend Ann-Catherine Kleinklaus, stole hundreds, maybe thousands of paintings and objets d’art while only in his 20s.

Breitwieser was a young man who grew up wealthy and spoiled by his mother until a traumatic divorce that broke with his father and left him and his mother quite poor. Not that he went out and got a job. Instead, he lived with his mother, received some money from his father, and was supported by the state.

He loved the beautiful things that filled his father’s house, though, and he read extensively about art and antiques, becoming very knowledgeable. Then one day while visiting a museum, he swiped a lovely ivory statue of Adam and Eve. It was easy.

Breitwieser seemed compelled to steal these beautiful things, not to sell them but to decorate his two attic rooms and to be admired and touched. Kleinklaus participated in his thefts—it seems, because she won’t talk about it—mostly to keep him from doing something reckless.

This is a fascinating story of obsession gone wrong. It manages to build a fair amount of suspense along the way and is written in more of a novelistic style.

One thing that disturbed me slightly was a hint of not exactly admiration but in any case just a bit of the kind of attention that fuels some people to do heinous acts. I say this despite the book’s deprecations of Breitwieser’s actions. It particularly grated when I learned what became of the more fragile items in his collection once he was caught.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting true crime book.

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The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios

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Review 2626: Life Among the Qallunaat

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Life Among the Qallunaat is a memoir by Mini Aodla Freeman, an Inuit woman who became a translator and eventually a playwright, poet, and author, and respected elder of her people. This memoir begins when, at nineteen, she went to work as a translator in Ottawa, but then it returns to the events of her childhood and ends with her departure to Ottawa.

Mini was born on Cape Hope Island on James Bay, in what is now Nunavut. Aside from the nomadic nature of her family’s Inuit life, when she became older, she had many experiences away from her family. She was sent to school after her mother died at such a young age that she was the smallest child and was picked on by the others at the instigation of her cousin. Unlike the other children, she was not picked up by her family at the end of the year, so one of the teachers took her home. Then her father came to get her during the next term, and her family kept her home for the next year. Despite obstacles, she managed to finish eighth grade and did some schoolwork beyond that.

At 15 or 16, she helped out at the infirmary of her school and was encouraged to study nursing, so she did that for a while and later was hospitalized for tuberculosis. Yet after recovering, she stayed at the hospital doing nursing duties. During the stay in the hospital, she was called on to translate, because she spoke her dialect of Inuit as well as Cree, French, and eventually English. She lived with a family as a nanny for about a year but left after that same cousin made trouble for her. Instead, she took a job as a laundress at a school for a while, but she found it mentally unstimulating, so she switched jobs with a school house mistress who found it impossible to control her charges, a situation Mini had no trouble with.

This book is fascinating not only because of the details of Mini’s life but also for her explanations of Inuit customs and the differences between her people’s ways of thinking and behaving and our own. It is simply written, touching at times, and definitely an adventure to read. I believe I put this book on my list after last year’s Nonfiction November.

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Review 2579: A Short History of Nearly Everything

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I picked out A Short History of Neary Everything because it filled one of the last holes in my A Century of Books project and I generally enjoy Bill Bryson. I don’t know what I thought it was about—I think I expected it would be something like At Home, which told the histories of objects and rooms in an ordinary house. But silly me, it’s all science.

It’s not that I never read about science, but I have a limited tolerance for it.

When I first began reading it—actually for the first few chapters—I wondered who the audience for it was. It seemed to be telling about things I supposed most people know, so I wondered if it was for middle grade readers. But it certainly was never marketed that way.

It took a while before Bryson got to subjects that I wasn’t as familiar with, but in any case one of his strengths is finding out strange facts or biographical details of the scientists who made discoveries, so that he makes the material more interesting. And he writes with a lively style. However, he also really likes numbers, which are in general fairly meaningless to me (although he does make good comparisons to make them at least imaginable).

But this is a very long book, nearly 600 pages, and after a while I found myself skipping material. The first thing I skipped was the end of a chapter after it started getting too far into particle physics. Later, I skipped the entire chapter on cells. The geology chapter was interesting, but I was less than 100 pages from the end of the book when I finally pooped out. It didn’t even work to take a break and read a different book. It also didn’t help that such a book becomes rapidly out of date.

As a side note, I found the format of the library’s fancy version a little annoying. It used magazine-style callouts. That is, they didn’t provide additional information but just included quotes from the text. The purpose of such callouts in a magazine is to attract attention to the article, but in a book that you’re already reading?

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Review 2574: Girl, Interrupted

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Girl, Interrupted is Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the time she spent as a young adult in a mental hospital. These days, people are booted out of mental facilities as soon as their insurance runs out, recovered or not, but back in the late 60s, apparently some were put in and kept for a long time. The book blurb says two years, but the copy of her medical records looks like closer to a year-and-a-quarter.

What was shocking to me from the first was that she was sent to the hospital on the basis of a short visit to a strange psychiatrist who noticed she had picked a pimple (what adolescent doesn’t?) and wrote down “picking at herself,” and then asked her if she was tired. She said yes because she got up earlier than usual to go to the appointment. Next thing she knew, she was in a cab to the hospital.

Later, she shows the medical report, which says the diagnosis was based on a three-hour interview, but Kaysen devotes a chapter to the timings, including check-in times reported by the hospital and the doctor’s office, to show it was no longer than 20-30 minutes. (She originally says ten.)

Perhaps she’s not an altogether reliable narrator, because she admits in the Introduction to not telling things, and later we hear about one disturbing behavior, although it doesn’t seem to be one that requires incarceration of more than a year. She also tells of a suicide attempt but says she knew immediately it was a mistake.

Other practices of the hospital seem ridiculous, and nothing seems designed toward the girls’ recovery but rather the staff’s convenience.

Interesting stuff.

Towards the end of the book, she dismisses her diagnosis, “character disorder,” and talks about what that might mean. Her own diagnosis is that she was bored and being forced to do things she didn’t want to do. I think that’s called being a teenager.

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Review 2564: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

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I usually enjoy Barbara Kingsolver, but even in her fiction, she can get preachy, so I have avoided her nonfiction. That is, I avoided it until I saw that this book filled a hole in my A Century of Books project. (At the book’s reading, I had seven or eight to go. Now, while I’m typing up this review, I have three. By the time it appears, I hope to have finished.)

Although Kingsolver is the primary author of the book, it also contains essays or informational sidebars written by her husband, Steve L. Hope, and her oldest daughter, Camille Kingsolver. It is about food—in particular, her family’s decision to act on its principles. To do so, they move from Arizona to her husband’s farm in Southern Appalachia (somewhere in Virginia). The idea is to try to live for a year only on food they grew or raised themselves or on local food.

Kingsolver has chapters on issues, for example, an early one is on the growth cycle—which vegetables and fruits are started when and when they are ready to be picked. (I didn’t find her concept of the vegetannual helpful at all. A timeline might have worked better.) But for the most part, she tells the story of the year, the things they plant or raise and when, the people they meet, the things they learn. These chapters were mostly interesting and sometimes entertaining. I was truly wrapped up in suspense about whether the turkey eggs would hatch.

Kingsolver talks also about issues around local food, such as how much gas is used transporting food that isn’t local to supermarkets; the takeover of Federal funds for farmers by large conglomerates (your local farmer isn’t getting the money); the negative effects genetically engineered seeds have on farmers, especially for organic farms; the growing local food movement and how to support it; and so on. The sidebars were some of the same topics, though, so I sometimes felt as if I was in church—tell them, tell them again, and tell them again. (Just as my own sidebar, I remember at about age ten asking my father after church why they did that and finishing my polite question with, “Do they think we’re idiots?”) You can see I have no patience with that kind of thing.

So, that’s a criticism, but on the other hand, lots of things in the book were interesting, and the descriptions of the meals had me licking my lips, recipes included in the book.

I personally have made steps at times to eat more locally. I belonged to a CSA for years, and I’m thinking of signing up for another one. I kept a vegetable garden here until growing trees cut off my sunlight, so now I just grow tomatoes on the back deck (in the tomato wagon). I try to stop often at a local farm store. (During the summer, I stop by every week, and I have stopped buying grocery store strawberries—I just wait for the fresh ones in late spring, because once I moved to this area and ate a real one, I realized that the ones in the store were not real.) In any case, this book has made me think of all this again.

Those of you who worry about the higher cost of local food may be very interested in the chapter about the food economics for a year. It turns out that when you forgo processed foods and do most of the cooking yourself, it’s a lot less expensive for a family to eat for a year even if paying more for some local foods. Of course, they were growing most of theirs, which everyone cannot do. However, like Michael Pollan also points out, Americans spend less money on food than people in most other countries. And even in the city, it’s possible to grow some of your food.

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Review 2561: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

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In February, I decided to take a break from trying to finish A Century of Books and revisit my intention to read more nonfiction books that I formed during Nonfiction November. I realized I hadn’t read any nonfiction at all in 2025, so I picked Cultish, which I read about last November.

Montell is a writer and language scholar, although, taking a note from her own approach, I wonder what “language scholar” means. This book is written for the general public and takes an entertaining rather than scholarly approach.

Although I noticed at the time I was reading that I was unable to summarize the topic of any chapter (each of which is unhelpfully named with something like “Repeat after me”), Montell makes clear what she means by a cult, broadens that definition to explore whether some organizations are cults or not (hence, “cultish”), and shows how true cults use language to attract and hold followers. She starts with some of the usual suspects, moves to the death cults, and then examines the cultish qualities of marketing companies like Amway and the niche health businesses like Peleton.

This is an interesting book, but it felt a little muddled to me, probably because I didn’t feel I could single out, except by the type of business or group, the central ideas of each section of the book.

Also, I saw some evidence of sloppiness. The first was simply a syntax issue. It says on page 28, “If you subscribe to an astrology app or have ever attended a music festival, odds are that in the 1970s, you’d have brushed up against a cult.” Now, what does that mean, given that there were no astrology apps in the 1970s? or any apps for that matter. I think she meant, “If you . . . app or attended a music festival in the 1970s, odds are . . . .” To make that sentence crystal clear, you’d start the pairing with the music festival.

That’s fairly minor (except that she’s a language scholar), but she twice brings up the Branch Davidian incident and both times slightly misrepresents what happened. I lived in Texas then and remember what happened, but just in case my memories were false, I looked it up. On pages 38 and 39, she says that the FBI showed up in response to concerns expressed by families of the members. I thought, what? The FBI would never show up en masse for a reason like that, and I remembered that it was actually the ATF who came first. They came based on reports from neighbors and a gun sales business that the Branch Davidians were stockpiling weapons. Of course, everyone was shocked by the incident, especially its outcome, but it is interesting that Montell left that out, because it minimizes the role of the Branch Davidians in how the incident started. And that is also an interesting use of language.

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Review 2540: Elizabeth and Essex

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Years ago, I read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and found it both informative and entertaining—full of scandalous information about some of the Victorian age’s most prominent citizens. I was hoping for something similar from this book, but it is a little more serious, although Strachey gets some zingers in.

The book is the 1928 version of history written for the general public. There are a very few footnotes and a couple of pages of bibliography at the end. It is written in Lytton’s liquid, sometimes sardonic style.

This book is about Queen Elizabeth and her last favorite, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. He was more than 30 years younger than she and the stepson of her earlier favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth’s relationships with her favorites, at least with this one, seemed more like volatile love affairs than anything else, with fulsome compliments expected and fiery spats, which usually resulted in Essex stomping out and being forgiven after an apology. In fact, considering her own temper, I’m surprised that Elizabeth put up with him, because he certainly treated her less respectfully than he would if his sovereign was a man.

You have to get used to Strachey, because he starts out right away by making assertions about Elizabeth’s character without giving examples or showing how he is right, as a modern historian would do. And his depiction seems pretty sexist. Over time, he demonstrates some of these characteristics, though. Still, Elizabeth’s main problem with Essex seemed to be that he didn’t behave as if she was his sovereign. I think he had an inherent assumption that he was superior because he was a man, not surprising in that time.

Without going into all the details of the story, which Strachey labels “tragic,” I’ll say that it boils down to temperaments. Essex was proud and fiery, and he valued his family name. He had poor judgement about who to take advice from and was actually incapable of taking any that involved caution and circumspection. He was brave in battle and pictured himself as a great war commander, but he was not. In fact, he seemed to me like a charismatic, well-liked bear of little brain. But he wrote wonderful letters.

Strachey clearly didn’t like Sir Walter Raleigh, but I don’t know why. He just hinted around about him. According to Strachey, no one liked him.

Essex was a loyal friend to many, among them Francis Bacon. It was Bacon’s Machievellian advice that Essex was unable to follow. Despite Essex having supported him for several positions, Bacon did his best to put the nail in Essex’s coffin when he was tried for treason.

This is an interesting book and even though Essex seemed to me like a spoiled baby most of the time, I saw by the end that indeed it was a tragic story.

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