Last year, I participated in Nonfiction November, and it was fun, even though I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. It takes a different approach than a lot of the challenges, which just have you reading books from the topic or time. Instead, each week it asks a series of questions about your nonfiction reading throughout the year.

The hosts this year are Liz of Adventures in reading, running and working from home, Frances of Volatile Rune, Heather of Based on a True Story, Rebekah of She Seeks Nonfiction, and Deb of Readerbuzz. Each week one of the hosts lists a different set of prompts for people to answer.

Here’s the prompt for this week.

Week 1 (10/28-11/1) Your Year in Nonfiction: Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more?  What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? (Heather)

What books have I read?

I only read 12 nonfiction books this year, which I suppose by any standard is a poor showing. I don’t want to list them all, but let me categorize them by overall topic.

• Histories: 3
• Memoirs: 5
• Biographies: 3
• Graphic nonfiction (graphic as in graphic novel): 2
• Essays: 1

You can see that these numbers add up to more than 11. That’s because the categories overlap a bit.

What were my favorites?

I read two literary biographies by Lucy Worsley and found her writing style so smooth, funny, and lively that I liked them a lot. These were Jane Austen at Home and Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman. I also very much liked the charming graphic biography by Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest.

Another book that stands out for writing style is the ironic but informative style of Thomas King in his book The Inconvenient Indian, about the history of broken treaties, evil government policies and so on toward the native peoples of Canada and the United States. I put this book in the essays category because it jumps from topic to topic, but it could also be in the history category and in current events, if I had a category like that. My review of that book hasn’t come out yet, but I compared him to Bill Bryson in writing style but with more sarcasm.

An interesting memoir for me was The Islandman by Tomás O’Crohan, translated from the Irish by Robin Flower. It is the recollections of a man born on the Blasket Islands off the coast of Southern Ireland in 1865, a very primitive existence.. Part of what I refer to as my “forced march through Ireland” 30 years ago included hiking up a hill on the Dingle Peninsula to look at the Blasket Islands, which have been unoccupied since the 1950s, when the Irish government removed the few remaining inhabitants.

It’s actually a little hard to answer this question, because I liked all of the nonfiction books I read this year. I always like David Grann, for example, and his history of The Wager in its last voyage was as compelling as usual.

Have I had a favorite topic?

I think it’s clear from my list of books that I like books about people, so I have read a preponderance of memoirs and biographies, but also histories about people more than events. For example, I put under the histories and biographies categories Hunting the Falcon by John Grey and Julia Fox, about the early lives of and relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. I haven’t reviewed this one yet, either.

I only read one book on this topic this year, but I also like true crime and books about topics like spiritualism (not in the philosophical sense but histories about it), so what could be better than a book that combined both? It’s The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale. The crime in this one isn’t a murder or anything, just ripping people off.

Is there a topic I want to read more about?

Not specifically, although perhaps I would like to read more about the Halifax explosion, and I have so far only read fiction about that. I will probably just continue to read the types of nonfiction that I usually read. I don’t usually go out looking for nonfiction, but if I hear about a new book by a favorite author or read someone’s review of one that sounds interesting, I’ll look for it. I believe I heard of Hunting the Falcon in a review by Helen of SheReadsNovels.

I could also swear that I read another book on the Blasket Islands, but looking at the available ones online does not ring a bell for me, although there are several similar memoirs to the one I read this year. It’s just that I vividly remember the part about having to leave the island. Anyway, when I tried to figure out what book I read, I saw Island by Alastair MacLeod. I’m not altogether sure it is set on the Blaskets (in fact, I think they are not), but remote Irish and Scottish island life has always appealed to me, so I have put it on my reading list.

What am I hoping to get out of Nonfiction November?

Last year I made a list of other people’s nonfiction reads with the idea of reading some of them. I didn’t think I read any of them, but I did, The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn, Ducks by Kate Beaton, and I have The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell on my desk! And today, I am going to check that the others are on my To-Read list on The StoryGraph, so I don’t forget them. (They are!)

Otherwise, it’s kind of nice to reflect back on what I have read. In addition, the entries from last year by other people made me think about nonfiction more and add 8 nonfiction books to my To-Read list.

This week’s host is Hopewell’s Public Library of Life, and the theme 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!

I haven’t participated in this event before, and I am not a big nonfiction reader, but I got a lot of ideas during the month for further nonfiction reading. Here are the nonfiction books mentioned this month that piqued my interest. I’m just dividing these up by weeks to give me a little space between cover images.

Books from Week Two

The theme for Week Two was what attracts you to a book, so a lot of people were just showing interesting covers. But even though I don’t think I use covers to attract me to nonfiction books generally, these made me look at a few books more carefully.

I saw A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders posted on She Seek’s Nonfiction‘s page during week two. It sounds right up my alley, and it has a beautiful cover. I hadn’t heard of it before.

Entering the Enchanted Castle had the cover of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn on the post for Week Two. That reminded me that one of my best friends told me about the book, so I put it on my TBR. And again, what a great cover!

I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice what’s going on in our political arena, so when Silver Button Books put the cover of Cultish by Amanda Montell up in Week Two, I immediately added it to my TBR.

Books from Week Three

The theme for Week Three was pairing a nonfiction and fiction book. I admit that in a few cases, the fiction book looked more interesting to me than the nonfiction. However, here were four nonfiction books that struck my interest.

The cover of Shy Love Smiles and Acid Drops that Whispering Gums listed for Week Three as well as its subject matter made me put it right on my TBR. OK, this time I admit picking a nonfiction book for its cover.

Books Please featured a memoir called The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell for Week Three, and as I love the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint and have read some fiction by Faviell, I’m definitely putting this one on my TBR.

I love Amitav Ghosh, and I was unaware of the nonfiction book he’d written, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis until I saw it on Unsolicited Feedback‘s post.

Entering the Enchanted Castle listed The Wild Silence, also by Raynor Winn, and I have to read it because of the cover and because it’s about Iceland.

Books from Week Four

For some reason many of the participants’ choices for Week Four weren’t grabbing me. The theme was Worldview Shapers, and maybe it was because some of participants didn’t really explain much about their choices but just posted their covers. Many of the participants posted several books on one subject, so I felt a little overwhelmed to pick one of them, even if I was interested in it, as I was by the holocaust books and the ones on the aboriginal experience, for example. In any case, Shoe’s Seeds and Stories selected the graphic nonfiction book Ducks by Kate Beaton, which I was already planning to read and in fact have in my pile right now.

This week’s host is She Seeks Nonfiction, and the theme is Worldview Shapers:

One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone?

I can’t answer this one with just one book, and I can think of a few books that I read before blogging that made me see things differently. However, I’ll stick mostly to ones that I have reviewed on this blog.

One was a book recommended by my brother called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan, an acclaimed religious scholar. Aslan’s goal was to try to find as much evidence as possible about the man Jesus aside from the religious claims. In other words, the historical record. What he found was that most of what we think we know about his life is myth, created by the gospel writers years after his death to further the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.

On the subject of religion, another book that affected me profoundly before I started the blog was Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, about the beliefs and behavior of some fringe apostolic Mormon groups.

A book that might be popular again now that told me something I didn’t know about from history is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which profoundly shocked me when I read it four years ago. As most of you probably know, it’s about members of the wealthy Osage tribe who were murdered by their guardians (the government deeming they were not able to look after their own interests) or white family members in order to get claims to their share of the oil money. The movie that is out now by Martin Scorsese is excellent.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman explains the results of years of scientific experiments that show that most of our decisions are made by our unconscious rather than our conscious mind. This was an entertaining book full of intellectual surprises and little exercises that you can try yourself that show the profound implications of how we make our decisions.

I was aware that DDT was banned as a result of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring, but her book about the poisons that we still use every day in agriculture and other industries made me realize why the world seems to be dying of cancer. This book may have been written in 1962, but it still needs to be paid attention to. I think everyone should read it.

Finally, for me personally, the first book I ever reviewed on this blog was revelatory. That is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, about the foods we eat and how our basis in corn and soy is not really good for us. I was even more profoundly affected by his In Defense of Food, but I read it before starting this blog.

This week’s host for Nonfiction November is Liz of Adventures in reading, running and working from home. The theme is Book Pairings, and here is its description:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like!

This is a toughie. I can think of some obvious pairings, like Middlemarch and My Life in Middlemarch, or the biographies of authors whose books I have read, or Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and one of those Russian books, but I was looking for something more creative.

Here’s what I came up with: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance is the world-renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s nonfiction account of a collection of netsuke that belong to his family and what happened to it during World War II, when the family thought it was stolen by the Nazis. In tracing the collection, de Waal traces his own family history, beginning with Charles Ephrussi, the original owner of the collection, who was the cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather and also the inspiration for Proust’s Charles Swann.

I’m pairing this with Great House by Nicole Krauss, a collection of linked short stories about the migrations of a desk, which the character Nadia tries to find after giving it away because she cannot write without it. The desk turns out to have a sad history and comes to represent all the objects lost in the Holocaust.

Week Two of Nonfiction November is hosted by Volatile Rune. The theme is Choosing Books, and here is its description:

What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to? Do you have a particular writing style that works best? When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking. 

I am not nearly as big a nonfiction reader as I am a fiction reader, so to answer this question, I had to look back at my list of nonfiction books since I started my blog. It’s clear that I like to read books about literary subjects and biographies and memoirs, often by or about literary figures, but although I have read a few, not often celebrity biographies and memoirs. I think in general I just look for nonfiction books that pique my interest in some way, either because of who wrote them or what they are about.

Although the cover generally influences me for fiction books, I haven’t been able to discover that I read any nonfiction books because of their covers. However, I will read books by certain authors: the biographers Doris Kearns Goodwin, Claire Tomalin, and Ron Chernow, for example. I also like true crime novels, but mostly true crime of an older vintage, so I have enjoyed a couple of books by Kate Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, The Wicked Boy) and have another one on my pile.

There are also periods of history I’m interested in, particularly the Wars of the Roses. I’ll read histories and biographies about that time.

I am not very scientific minded, but occasionally I hear of a book about science that sounds fascinating. I have an upcoming review of The Bathysphere Book that I found really interesting, and it has a great cover illustration.

Ten years ago, I discovered John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, about how our continent was formed geologically, in four big, fat volumes, and I read every one. Fascinating stuff, and McPhee is a great writer.