Tag: nonfiction

Nonfiction November: Week Five

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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.

Nonfiction November: Week Four

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Here we are already coming up on week four of Nonfiction November. It’s gone by really fast. This week, the prompt is as follows:

Week 4 (11/18-11/22) Mind Openers: One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is the way it can open your eyes to the world around you–no plane ticket required. 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? Is there a book where, if everyone read it, you think the world would be a better place? (Rebekah)

I don’t think any of my nonfiction choices this year impacted me as strongly as expressed in the prompt. Rather, some reaffirmed my interest in topics that I have neglected. I like reading books that tell me something I didn’t know about, and this year, the only one that fits in that category is David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. It is about an ill-conceived venture of 1740 to capture rich Spanish ships in the Pacific Ocean. It was part of the War of Jenkin’s Ear, a conflict I also know nothing about (something to look up!). The expedition left too late for good conditions and had misestimated when the best weather for rounding Cape Horn would be. The Wager was the smallest ship in the fleet. It underwent some problems before getting to the Horn, and when it did, it was shipwrecked. What was most interesting was what happened among the crew once it was wrecked.

Another book that restressed some reading I had already done was The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King, which I have not yet reviewed. It merely reconfirmed and built upon my reading from way back, when I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Our history with dealing with native peoples is shameful, and our double-dealing hasn’t stopped. I need to get more informed on this issue and see what is going on today.

As I mentioned before, I really didn’t read much nonfiction this year despite my resolve to read more. It just didn’t happen that way, but I’ll try harder next year.

Nonfiction November: Week Three

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I had to think a lot about what I could do for this week, because the most self-evident answer to the prompt was too obvious. Here’s the prompt for this week:

Cover for Wolf Hall

Week 3 (11/11-11/15) Book Pairings: 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. Or (because I’m doing this myself) two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)

Cover for Bring Up the Bodies

Maybe this pairing is obvious, too, but it didn’t immediately come to mind. Here it is, though. I recently finished the history/biography Hunting the Falcon: Henry VII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox. This account begins when both figures are younger, with Henry becoming king and Anne first going to the French court. But it concentrates on the years of their relationship and marriage, including the fallout from Henry’s divorce of Katherine.

I’m actually pairing this nonfiction book with three fiction books that concentrate on the same subject matter, and they, of course, are well known. I meant Hilary Mantel’s outstanding trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. The trilogy begins with Wolf Hall, in which Cromwell helps Henry with his divorce from Katherine so he can marry Anne. It continues with Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell eventually helps ruin Anne after she fails to produce a son and Henry sets his eyes on Jane Seymour. Finally, it ends in The Mirror and the Light, which begins with the beheading of Anne.

Whether you’re interested in the nonfiction or the fiction books, you’ll be entertained, but the trilogy happens in my opinion to be a set of top historical fiction books.

Nonfiction November: Week Two

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Here’s the prompt for Week Two of Nonfiction November:

Week 2 (11/4-11/8) Choosing Nonfiction: 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. (Frances)

What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to?

As far as the overall categories are concerned, I tend to gravitate toward history and biography, with a distinct slant toward reading about literary figures. However, there are certain periods of history that appeal to me (the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors, for example), and there are certain authors that I trend toward, usually buying any books that I come across. Here are some of those authors:

  • Bill Bryson
  • Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • David Grann
  • Erik Larson
  • Kate Summerscale
  • Claire Tomalin
  • Lucy Worsley

As you can see, several of these names are historians and biographers. I also like reading about art and true crime.

Do you have a particular writing style that works best?

Where writing style is concerned, I obviously want the book to be well written. In nonfiction, writing can get pretty academic and stuffy. If I’m not reading a book for a particular research goal, then I prefer the style to be more informal, maybe even with a touch of humor. However, Goodwin uses a more formal style, but it is eminently readable and not stodgy.

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.

Yes, of course, the covers influence me to buy books. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. However, I’m more influenced by the author than the cover, usually. Titles not so much in nonfiction, because they are often stodgy or ruined by those stupid subtitles they all seem to have now. I think the cover that I liked best from my reading of the last year was the one for The Salt Path (note no subtitle).

Nonfiction November: Week One

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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.

Review 2486: A Chelsea Concerto

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A Chelsea Concerto is Frances Faviell’s memoir of the Blitz. Although I have now read several memoirs and novels set during this time, this one is remarkable for its integration of war news and its detailed descriptions of air attacks and their results. Faviell lived in Chelsea during the Blitz—an area that was very hard hit—and the book ends with a massive bombing of the area.

The book begins before the official war, with Faviell getting involved with working with Belgian refugees because of her ability to speak several languages. It continues to follow events of the war and the Blitz. It’s so detailed as to indicate that Faviell must have notes or diaries to refer to, as the memoir was not published until 1959. The descriptions of damage caused by the bombings is very vivid.

Unfortunately, Faviell often assumes knowledge on the part of readers that they may not have, either because it was common knowledge at the time or that it was so familiar to her that she didn’t think it needed explaining. This problem includes unexplained abbreviations, people identified only by name with little context, and at the end of the book, a mysterious reference to some event three years after the events of the memoir.

Also, there are lots of people mentioned in the book but characterization of only a few of them. This led me sometimes to be confused about who they were.

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Review 2455: Spam Tomorrow

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Spam Tomorrow is Verily Anderson’s memoir. Although it briefly hits other times of her life, it concentrates on the war years and ends shortly after D-Day.

The book begins with Anderson’s marriage to Donald, an event not encouraged by her parents because of his lack of wealth and an age difference that is unstated but I figure has to be at least 20 years.

At the beginning of the war, Verily, having already been warned off Donald , volunteers as an ambulance driver. At first, the drivers mostly just wait around to be dispatched, and later, she is erratic in her actual attendance at this job, getting very sick and later going off when she feels like it. She keeps running into Donald, though, who is found unfit for the military because of physical reasons and instead is working for the Ministry of Information. Finally, they decide to marry.

Most of the book has to do with the struggles—sometimes serious ones but related in a lighthearted manner—of living in London during the Blitz, of a difficult pregnancy, of motherhood, and of problems trying to find a suitable home to raise children when you’re not well off and being bombed.

Again, although sometimes concerned with serious problems, like Verily’s difficult first childbirth and subsequent illness, the memoir is related in a lighthearted manner and is often amusing. It provides yet another angle on British life during the war.

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Review 2447: Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

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Ducks is Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir about the two years she spent working in the oil sands of Alberta. Originally from Nova Scotia, she was unable to find work at home that would pay enough to pay off her student debts. So, like many others, she traveled to Fort McMurray to get a higher paying job.

She found herself in a hyper-masculine setting that was toxic, where she encountered routine sexual harassment and was raped twice in her first year. She does attempt to show the whole story, the loneliness of both herself and the men, the nice people she encounters, and so on.

Other themes in the book are the poisoning of the environment, the lip service to corporate safety, the harm to local people, especially the First Nations.

I thought this book was interesting. The cartoons are not beautiful, but they are good enough to tell characters apart and to recognize emotions. It certainly provided a window into another kind of life.

It struck me how often the most beautiful areas to live in are the ones where it’s most difficult to gain a living. I grew up in Michigan, which in my time was a have-not state, but not as bad as Eastern Canada, apparently.

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Review 2320: The Haunting of Alma Fielding

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The two previous books I’ve read by Kate Summerscale were Victorian true crime stories. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding she changes genres (slightly) and periods to write about the spate of supernatural cases, and one in particular, that hit England when World War II was threatening in 1938.

The principal figure in the book is Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian emigré who studied the supernatural but also had an interest in Freudian psychology. When the Fielding case cropped up, he was in a difficult position, because although his mission was to prove whether there were legitimate supernatural occurrences, when he tried to use somewhat scientific methods of observation, he was accused of being unfriendly to mediums. His role at the Society for Psychical Research was contradictory at best and his notion of the scientific not very well developed.

The Fielding case began with a frightened family haunted by a poltergeist that hurled dishes and toppled furniture. Fairly quickly, it became clear that the activity centered around Alma, who lived in the house with her husband and lodger, and the spirits began to branch out by producing objects from her clothes at séances.

Fodor seemed so happy to have found what looked like legitimate supernatural activity that he believed everything he was told and actually encouraged the “spirits.” When later he found evidence that Alma deceived him, he still believed that some of the events were real and continued his investigation.

I found this book less interesting than the true crime books because I became so impatient with the gullibility of the investigators. And the medium tricks! After all, even if a spirit could produce small objects (called apports) from a person’s body, why would it want to? Obviously, because it’s an effect that can be faked.

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Review 2310: Jane Austen at Home

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Although I read Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen years ago and thought it was very good, I feel that historian Lucy Worsley’s book provides a more personal look at Austen with more detail about her everyday life. Although some references are drawn from Worsley’s knowledge of Georgian society, she doesn’t hesitate to draw inferences from Austen’s novels and letters. Further, I think she has a better sense than some biographers of when in Austen’s letters she is joking

Worsley points out how important a settled home is in Austen’s fiction. Certainly, from the time of her father’s retirement from Steventon, that is something she and her sister and mother did not have that provoked much anxiety.

It was Tomalin’s suggestion that Austen was unable to write when she was unsettled, but Worsley suggests that Austen was working on novels all along but not doing much to market them. She also pointed out some subversive ideas in Austen’s fiction that I never noticed despite how many times I’ve read the novels. In any case, she does a good job of showing how revolutionary Austen’s fiction was for her time.

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