Non Fiction November
Week 2: (Nov 7 – 11) Sarah’s Book Shelves is hosting Week 2 of 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.
Right: Extract of cover from Richard Powers The Overstory
Thoreau wrote in Walden
“This was an airy and unflustered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as weep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.”
Writers like Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald combine deep knowledge of natural history with literature and spirit with geology. I want a writer that I know has put in the ten thousand hours of research about their subject and will offer up insights into the way that knowledge works in the world. Or the way it doesn’t.
In The Old Ways Macfarlane writes:
“By an old stone bridge he dropped down to the riverside to show me where two yews had grown into one another. Their joint foliage was covered with translucent red berries, life half-sucked cherry drops. ‘These are the oldest living beings of the Guadarrama….”
Trees are often the oldest living beings of anywhere but we choose to forget that. We think nothing of burning and cutting trees for our furniture, for palm oil and other products. But the writers are fighting back, along with the activists. Richard Powers Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory examines how trees affect the lives of a group of people who pass by them everyday – sometimes unknowingly. A disparate group of characters – an artist, an under-graduate from an actuarial course, a scientist, an air force veteran come together for differing reasons of their own but all with the same aim – a desperate attempt to save a few remaining forests in the US from annihilation.
These places where a goddess might trail her garments I am looking for in non-fiction work. But such places are tragically few and perhaps soon will exist only between the covers of books.
Thank you also to the hosts for 2019 – Katie of Doing Dewey, Julz of Julz Reads, Rennie of What’s Nonfiction, Sarah of Sarah’s Book Shelves, and Leann of Shelf Aware.This event runs for five weeks, with five weekly discussion topics, giving us a chance to highlight and talk about our non-fiction reads.
