Nonfiction November

Nonfiction November Week 5 – New to my TBR

I hope everyone who took part in Nonfiction November got something out of it – principally some fantastic reading and tons of new ideas about possible areas to read up on.

It has been a great experience for me personally. I’ve loved helping to host and I’ve found some amazing books which are going to keep me busy for the longest time. I’ve also found some great new bloggers to follow.

Week 5 is our final week of the challenge and we are hosted by Lisa at Hopewell’s Public Library of Life.

The prompt for this final week is:

Description: (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!

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So without further ado here’s my list.

Ada’s Ideas: The Story of ADA Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was the daughter of Lord Byron, a poet, and Anna Isabella Milbanke, a mathematician. Her parents separated when she was young, and her mother insisted on a logic-focused education, rejecting Byron’s “mad” love of poetry. But Ada remained fascinated with her father and considered mathematics “poetical science.” Via her friendship with inventor Charles Babbage, she became involved in “programming” his Analytical Engine, a precursor to the computer, thus becoming the world’s first computer programmer. This picture book biography of Ada Lovelace is a compelling portrait of a woman who saw the potential for numbers to make art.

I found this book on Literary Potpourri

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The Woman They Could Not Silence: The Timeless Story of an Outspoken Woman and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened–by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.

This Wilkie Collins-esque saga seems to belong in the deeps of history but no. The actor Cary Grant’s horrific childhood saga – currently on our screens – was set in the 20^th century, 50 years later than the events recounted in Moore’s book, yet a time when men could still confine their wives to an insane asylum with impunity.

I found The Woman they Could Not Silence on Silver Button Books.

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Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince

Why play to 12,000 people when you can play to 12? In Autumn 2021, Robin Ince’s stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox was postponed due to the pandemic. Rather than do nothing, he decided he would instead go on a tour of over a hundred bookshops, from Wigtown to Penzance; from Swansea to Margate.

Packed with anecdotes and tall tales, Bibliomaniac follows Robin up and down the country in his quest to discover just why he can never have enough books. It is the story of an addiction and a romance, and also of an occasional points failure just outside Oxenholme.

I found Bibliomaniac on Bookish Beck.

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Landbridge: Life in Fragments by Y-Dang Troeung

Born in, and named after, Thailand’s Khao-I-Dang refugee camp, Y-Dang Troeung was – aged one – the last of 60,000 Cambodian refugees admitted to Canada, fleeing her homeland in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime. In Canada, Y-Dang became a literal poster child for the benevolence of the Canadian refugee project – and, implicitly, the unknowable horrors of the place she had escaped.

In Landbridge, a family and personal memoir of astonishing power, Y-Dang grapples with a life lived in the shadow of pre-constructed narratives. She considers the transactional relationship between a host country and its refugees; she delves into the contradictions between ethnic, regional and national identities; and she writes to her young son Kai with the promise that this family legacy is passed down with love at its core.
Written in fragmentary chapters, each with the vivid light of a single candle in a pitch-black room, Landbridge is a courageous piece of life writing, the story of a family, and a bold, ground-breaking intervention in the way trauma and migration are told.

I found Landbridge on Shoe’s Seeds and Stories

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The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

(fiction)

Commonly seen as the legendary Norwegian writer’s masterpiece, this story tells the tale of Siss and Unn, two friends who have only spent one evening in each other’s company. But so profound is this evening between them that when Unn inexplicably disappears, Siss’s world is shattered. The Ice Palace is written in prose of a lyrical economy that ranks among the most memorable achievements of modern literature.

I found this on Cathy@746 Books

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Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottleib

After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy’s, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carre, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton–not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America’s preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it–editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.

I found this book on The Intrepid Angeleno

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Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off down the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious expedition leader and three amateur boatmen. With its churning rapids, sheer cliffs, and boat-shattering boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. But for Clover and Jotter, it held a tantalizing appeal: no one had surveyed the Grand Canyon’s plants, and they were determined to be the first.

I found this book on Hopewell’s Public Library of Life.

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Well I’ve got a lot of books to read. Thank you again to everyone who has taken part in this challenge.

From 1st December Liz at Adventures in Reading is running a new challenge, Dean Street December, which celebrates an indie press dedicated to finding and republishing good fiction and nonfiction, so I’m off to find out what I need to read for that.

Nonfiction November Week 4 – Worldview Shapers

Rebekah (She Seeks Nonfiction) invites you to celebrate Nonfiction November. In Week 4, the prompt is:

Dates: 11/20-11/24
Title: Worldview Shapers
Description: 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?

My Worldview Shaper this week is a book which firmly comes under the ‘appalling’ category. Not the book of course, but the thing that it reveals. I make no apology for banging on about this work because I firmly believe that everyone should read it, while at the same time not being convinced that enough people have. Google says over half a million copies sold. Well that’s great but not enough.

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Caroline Criado Perez

I have reviewed this book before.

The epigram Perez chose for this book is a quote from Simone de Beauvoir:

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

I always knew that as a women – especially one born in the 1950s – I was a second class citizen but I had vague notions that, hey it was the 60s, you know, Beatles, Stones etc., with better educational and job opportunities, the pill, Germaine Greer, feminisim. Everything would be cool. But it wasn’t. It still isn’t. I have to keep reminding myself that this book was written as recently as 2019!

Perez states:

Most of recorded human history is one big data gap. Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead the lives of men have been taken to represent those overall.

Thus we have ‘mankind’. The idea that humanity is male unless otherwise stated. It’s not just a matter of language although language doesn’t help. The conditioning starts from day one, and has done for centuries.

This is a book full of statistics which need to be known – by everyone.

‘draw-a-scientist’ data shows that the drawings are invariably male.
In London women are three times more likely to take a child to school than a man. This is 2019.
Women still have less toilet provision in cinemas, theatres and public buildings than men. Yes folks – this is 2019! And no ‘gender neutral’ doesn’t work for anyone – except men – because women er.. cannot use urinals so just changing the signage might be cheap but its cheap in all senses of the word and doesn’t work!
Unfortunately there is evidence, Perez tells us, that using gender neutral language does nothing to alleviate the problems which are so deeply embedded in our psyche by centuries of conditioning.
For example, a study from human-computer interaction papers published in 2014 found much use of gender neutral terms like researcher, designer, participant, person, etc. Great! But the catch was that human beings, when asked to consider who or what was depicted by these terms, were most likely to interpret a male as depicted
Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group says Female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, but produce more than twice the revenue.

There’s a lot more of this scary, depressing stuff. But the worst and scariest aspect of all this – for women – is health and pharmaceuticals testing.

When I reviewed Invisible Women I quoted:

Accurate data is vital for research and appropriate solutions. Yet accurate data is not available if half the human race is excluded from its gathering simply because no-one has thought to consider whether one size really does fit all. If you base your research on skewed data, you get a skewed result. This is obvious, perhaps, when it is baldly stated but not at all obvious in the accepted course of knowledge production which has been going on for millennia.

This term ‘gender data gap’ is something I barely understood before reading Perez; now I understand it, it is frighteningly omniscient, and it is costing female lives.

As we move into goodness knows what sort of AI dominated future, the prejudices we have seen replicated time and time again will be perpetuated because that is how. ‘mankind’ thinks. There are already complaints about police facial recognition software not being sufficiently colour blind and no doubt women as servants will be right there in the mix.

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Next week is the final week of Nonfiction November when we will be talking about the books that we have added to our TBR as a result of this month’s challenge.

A Review of The Instant by Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot is an author who burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with a remarkable debut called The Outrun, a narrative nonfiction work on surviving addiction, childhood and loneliness mostly set on the bleakly beautiful Scottish island of Orkney where the writer grew up. I loved it.

Wiki says of The Outrun:

Liptrot’s prize-winning book has been translated into more than a dozen languages, hit The Sunday Times’ top ten bestsellers list and sold over 110,000 copies in the U.K. It has been added to publisher Canongate’s “modern classics” list.

Not bad for a first book. Also there is a film being made with Saoirse Ronan playing the author.

Liptrot has this marvellous descriptive, unselfpitying style of writing which hits with the immediacy of poetry. She also spends a huge amount of time on the internet – especially on the NASA website moonwatching – but manages to combine the digital worlds and the natural worlds in a way that makes the two seem not quite so incompatible as they often seem to me.

Maybe it was in some way inevitable that after such a galactic debut, the sequel would be a bit of a disappointment.

The Instant was published in 2022 and covers the period in Liptrot’s life after the first book, when she spent a year in Berlin seeking work, friendship, relationships, direction. We’ve all been there. But not everyone observes as closely as this. Even in the middle of the busy city of Berlin, nature is at the forefront of the author’s awareness. And the moon.

“I run a bath, consult my digital charts, then wait for the moon. My bath is next to the window and I open it wide to the cool air. I hear stray cats mewing in the stairwell, magpies rattling in the bare trees and the indistinct rumble of the city that reminds me of the wind back home”

I did enjoy The Instant which is structured as a series of essays rather than as a single narrative but somehow for me it lacked the emotional truth of the first book. And some of the writing felt earlier, as if it had been retrieved from earlier essays and articles, because of the need to produce a sequel.

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I will be back on Monday taking part in Week 3 of Nonfiction November which is hosted by

Liz – Adventures in reading, running and working from home

Thanks to everyone who has taken part in the challenge so far.

Nonfiction November #NonFicNov23 – Week Two, Choosing Nonfiction

I am excited to be hosting Week 2 of Nonfiction November this week. The other hosts for Nonfiction November are fellow bloggers Liz (Adventures in reading, running and working from home), , Heather (Based on a True Story), and Lisa (Hopewell’s Public Library of Life), and Rebekah (She Seeks Nonfiction).

Week 2Dates: 11/6-11/10
- Host: That would be me, Frances
- Title: Choosing Nonfiction
- 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.

Do you find yourself wandering around bookshops – that is if you are lucky enough to have access to a real bookshop these days – thinking that you fancy reading something ‘different’ but you’ve no idea what it is? I used to often feel this way.

We are peddled a relentless diet of best-sellers and known names, books which may or may not answer a need, and nowhere is that feeling stronger than in a high street bookstore. Where is the opportunity for that quirky discovery with the battered binding?

Since I have discovered the blogosphere and all my bookish friends online, I don’t really have a problem in finding books to read any more, quite the opposite. But I do miss just wandering around the shelves and picking up a book here or there just to see.

When browsing, I avoid footballers, celebrities and disgruntled royals. I look for good biography, memoir, art, art history. I mentioned in my post last week the occasional guilt complex at not reading more widely in other categories. Probably in 2024 I will try and address that.

In terms of a favoured cover I’m pretty sold on this one which is from my current read, Jackie Wullschlager’s Biography, Monet: The Restless Vision:

I love colour.

I think human beings are attracted to bright colours. Maybe Monet thought so too. Here is some colour courtesy of the net.

Geordanna Cordero on Unsplash

I’m also a fan of the new nature writing, usually a blend of authoritative essay style writing on the natural world, combined with autobiographical details from the life of the author

Little Toller Books have an excellent if a somewhat pricey array of these books. Here are three that have caught my eye.

. My

An allotment is a utopia. It is a green place where anyone can occupy a piece of land, and grow with freedom of expression.

I don’t know whether people that use allotments would agree with that idea, or how you grow with freedom of expression – or without freedom of expression unless you’re entering for Chelsea. I’m not really a gardener in any way shape or form but my brother in law has worked an allotment plus a garden for decades. I never quite understood how anyone manages all that work! I suspect he may not wish to read about the history of them though, so passing swiftly on.

Richard Mabey was maybe one of the first writers to write about mental health and natural world issues combined in his book Nature Cure which I have read. In my review I wrote:

Mabey’s book is an enlightening read, erudite without being dry, honest to the point of bleakness in parts, without being depressing. It was one of the first in the style which came to be known as the new nature writing, along with naturalist and friend Mark Cocker. These are books which entwine stories of the natural world with the writer’s own biographical tales.

Taking far longer than usual to move out of the house in which he grew up, and aided and abetted by a severe bout of depression, Mabey makes his belated escape to the Norfolk fens where he writes about sheets of water, the Wailing Wood, owls, birds, fens, the yellow star-of-bethlehem and orchids in an ‘ethereal shade of rose’. But his particular interest, like the poet John Clare

Mabey has written many, many books including a biography of the naturalist and author Gilbert White whom wiki credits with ‘shaping the modern attitude of respect for nature’ which seems a rather extraordinary claim. I didn’t realise there was a modern attitude of respect for nature judging by the ecology crisis we have on our hands. But I think I will put this one on my TBR.

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Does anyone else find themselves drawn to a particular theme or topic? Style of writing? Titles? Covers? They say you can’t tell a book by one, but hey, a good cover certainly helps.

If you are taking part in Nonfiction November Week 2, don’t forget to add your link below. I’ve been so happy to help host this challenge but the only thing I’ve been panicking about is the link party. Despite the kindness of Rebekah at (She Seeks Nonfiction) and others showing me what to do, my link party looks worryingly unlike anyone else’s. Therefore please if you have any problems, just leave the link to your post in the comments below.

Nonfiction November 2023 is here

Autumn is here, which means it’s almost time for Nonfiction November!

Throughout the month of November, bloggers Liz, Frances, Heather, Rebekah, and Lisa invite you to celebrate Nonfiction November with us.

Fellow bloggers Liz (Adventures in reading, running and working from home), Frances (Volatile Rune), Heather (Based on a True Story), and Lisa (Hopewell’s Public Library of Life), and Rebekah (She Seeks Nonfiction) invite you to celebrate Nonfiction November.

Meet your hosts!

Liz, who blogs at Adventures in reading, running and working from home, is an editor, transcriber, reader, reviewer, writer and runner. She likes reading literary fiction and nonfiction, travel and biography.

Frances blogs about the books she has read at Volatile Rune and is a published poet, reviewer, sometime storyteller and novelist.

Heather of Based on a True Story lives in Ohio with her husband, surrounded by lots and lots of critters!

Rebekah reads and writes about social justice, atheism, religion, science history, and more on She Seeks Nonfiction.

Last but not least, Lisa blogs at Hopewell’s Public Library of Life.

How it works

Each Monday, our weekly host will post our topic prompt and include a linkup where you can link your posts, connect with other bloggers, and dive deeper by reading and sharing nonfiction book reviews. Feel free to use our official Nonfiction November graphics, too!

Here are the topic prompts for each week:

Hosts in order of weeks are:

Heather – Based on a True Story
Frances – Volatile Rune
Liz – Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Rebekah – She Seeks Nonfiction
Lisa – Hopewell’s Public Library of Life

And here are the topics by week:

Week 1
- Dates: 10/30-11/3
- Host: Heather
- Title: Your Year in Nonfiction
- Description: 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?
Week 2
- Dates: 11/6-11/10
- Host: Frances
- Title: Choosing Nonfiction
- 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.
Week 3
- Dates: 11/13-11/17
- Host: Liz
- Title: Book pairings
- 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!
Week 4
- Dates: 11/20-11/24
- Host: Rebekah
- Title: Worldview Shapers
- Description: 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?
Week 5
- Dates: 11/27-12/1
- Host: Lisa
- Title: New to my TBR

Description: (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!

Volatile Rune Nonfiction Book of the Year Awards. My Year in Nonfiction 2022 #NonficNov #NonfictionBookParty

This week and for all of November I shall be taking part in Nonfiction November. Week 1: (Oct 31-Nov 4) – Your Year in Nonfiction: Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? (Katie @ Doing Dewey)

Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life is the volume which wins the Volatile Rune Book of the Year Award. Written originally in six volumes, the first three volumes have just been translated by Douglas Smith and republished by Vintage in 2022. I have already reviewed this remarkable book here and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in Russian history, from the collapse of the Romanov dynasty to the end of the First World War. This is not a history book as such though, it is a memoire of the things the author personally witnessed. In that it shares ground with my co-awardee, detailed later in this post.

Paustovsky was born in Moscow in 1892 although he grew up and was educted in Kiev. He survived the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik seizure of power (during which he was almost executed by an over-excited mob which is basically what the Bolsheviks were) and life as a paramedic on the frontlines of the First World War.

In 1909, after his father deserted the family, Paustovsky’s mother found herself unable to care for him and packed him off to live with an uncle. After that he wandered from place to place never settling anywhere for long. Although this inauspicious start in life did not stop him from becoming one of the greatest writers Russia has produced. Before he died he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature.

So the Volatile Rune Nonfiction Book of the Year award goes to Paustovsky. But much as I’m sure the great man would value this award, I do not think he would object to sharing. Therefore my award also goes to Readme.txt by Chelsea Manning, former US military intelligence analyst and whistle blower extraordinaire. What do they share in common? Humanity.

The title comes from the name of the file she uploaded to wikileaks which contained a 39 minute video of US soldiers killing civilians during the Iraq war. This video later was named Collateral Murder.

A bit of background. Chelsea’s father was in the US Navy stationed in the UK as an analyst at the time he met her mother, Susan Mary Fox, in a pub in Haverfordwest ‘at the tiny pub on Castle Square’. The two later married and moved to live in the states. Two children were born (Casey, and Bradley born a boy who later became Chelsea). Sadly the marriage did not work out and when the mother, an alcoholic, returned to Wales, Chelsea briefly went with her, before returning to live with her father in the US. After her father threw her out, there was a period of her life when she was homeless and living out of a truck.

Sadly it seemed that even at this stage of her life (she’s 17 here at this homeless stage) she is still trying to gain her father’s approbation. That’s one of the reasons Manning joined the army which was probably just about the worst place she could have ended up.

Athough academically brilliant and quickly snapped up for military intelligence work, Chelsea was emotionally and psychologically torn by her difficult childhood and by gender dysphoria – the feeling of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. At the beginning of the 21^st century there was not the conversation around transitioning that there might be now and certainly not within the US army, with its policy ‘don’t ask: don’t tell’ regarding sexual orientation.

If as a trans woman Chelsea could have chosen anywhere worse to be than the army, it would have been prison. She ended up there too.

The book begins with Chelsea trying to upload a cache of stolen files on DVD from a computer in a Barnes & Noble store using their wi-fi. Tens of thousands of files were uploaded detailing significant activities during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Later, these revelations would set Hillary Clinton off weeping about those who endangered other people – which might have been a justified concern – if it were not for the fact that the leaks were never shown to have endangered anyone nor hindered US relations with any country. Manning writes that privately Clinton “spent hours on the phone with diplomats all over the world telling them, in fact, that no-one was in danger because of the disclosures…”

That didn’t prevent the judge at her Court martial in 2013 sentencing her to 35 years in prison, despite the fact that she had already served years in gaol without trial, including in solitary confinement in an iron cage under conditions that a UN report would later characterise as ”cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture.”

I admit to being an admirer of Chelsea and other whistleblowers like Ed Snowden (who told the world about the US Gov mass collection of phone data to use against its own citizens). I am an admirer of anyone who is willing to stand up to speak truth to power at great personal risk to themselves. There are always a few good men – and women – with extraordinary courage, resilience and sheer dogged capacity for surviving things which seem to me unsurvivable.

If I have any complaints about Manning’s book it is that it is too short. I would have liked a little more on her current life. There is only a couple of pages devoted to what happens after she leaves prison. Her sentence was commuted by Barack Obama in 2017, as one of his last acts as outgoing president.

But she says that she is still in therapy for the things she witnessed in Iraq.

README.txt is more than just a book detailing disclosures. It is a manifesto on freedom and the price of fighting for it. This is not a price than can be paid by any one individual alone. A society which bases itself on the torment of individuals can never be free.

“What I did during my enlistment was an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civil disobedience. These form a deep and important tradition in our history, of forcing progress – a tradition we drew on to oppose an increasingly sinister Trump administration. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years. Now we are all left grappling with the past.”

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This has been quite a long post and I still haven’t answered all of the questions for week one of Nonfiction November. I’ve read and reviewed 12 nonfiction titles so far this year nearly all of them memoire or biographical accounts of artists and musicians, including: Tchaikovsky, Celia Paul, Charlotte Mew, T.S. Eliot and Giaccomo Leopardi. My one political book was Andrei Kurkov’s Ukraine Diaries.

Finally, what do I hope to get out of nonfiction November? Just keep reading more wonderful nonfiction books like these. Currently reading Dorothy Hodgkin, A Life by Georgina Ferry. Thank you to Sister Rune for the heads up on this one.

Nearly Nonfiction November

It’s almost November – time for my favourite reading challenge of the year. I shall be taking part in Nonfiction November again this year hosted by Katie@Doing Dewey, Rennie @ What’s Nonfiction. Christopher @ Plucked from the Stacks Rebekah @ She Seeks Nonfiction and Jaymi @ The OC Bookgirl.

Here is the timetable:

Week 1: (Oct 31-Nov 4) – Your Year in Nonfiction: Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? (Katie @ Doing Dewey)

Week 2: (November 7-11) – Book Pairing: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or another nonfiction!). It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story. Or pair a book with a podcast, film or documentary, TV show, etc. on the same topic or stories that pair together. (here with me, Rennie @ What’s Nonfiction)

Week 3: (November 14-18) – Stranger Than Fiction: This week we’re focusing on all the great nonfiction books that almost don’t seem real. A sports biography involving overcoming massive obstacles, a profile on a bizarre scam, a look into the natural wonders in our world—basically, if it makes your jaw drop, you can highlight it for this week’s topic. (Christopher @ Plucked from the Stacks)

Week 4: (November 21-25) – Worldview Changers: 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 has impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Do you think there is one book that everyone needs to read for a better understanding of the world we live in? (Rebekah @ She Seeks Nonfiction)

Week 5: (November 28-Dec 2) – 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! Pro tip: Start this draft post at the beginning of the month and add to it as your TBR multiplies. (Jaymi @ The OC Bookgirl)

Other Reading This Week

Meanwhile, this week I have read another book on my Classics Club List The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart. I grew up with Mary Stewart, her books I mean. My grandmother and mother both loved her work – The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, Wildfire at Midnight, Thunder on the Right, This Rough Magic. I remember loving them all, particularly the Merlin trilogy.

I was a bit shocked then to find that with this current read of The Moonspinners that I didn’t love it at all. The characters were quite stereotyped, both goodies and baddies. The narrator is Nicola, a 22 year old assistant from the British Embassy in Athens who comes to Crete for a few days holiday. She gets involved in some unpleasant goings on which she immediately takes charge of in the most unlikely manner.

There are an awful lot of convenient timings; people turning up or failing to turn up at crucial moments. A cousin, Frances, is supposed to join for the holiday but is running a day late so our intrepid heroine has a day alone to get herself into all sorts of difficulties. Although Frances does turn up – every time something relevant happens she is conveniently somewhere else, or has twisted her ankle so I failed to see what purpose she served. But of course that exactly is the point. Because at the time the book was written it was unlikely that a single woman would have taken a holiday alone; the Nicola needed a sort of chaperone who would prove ineffective and stay out of the way. The adventurous heroine able to make decisions and cope with situations for herself was considered a novelty in fiction in the middle of the twentieth century and Stewart was largely responsible for popularising this idea which combined mystery with female derring-do.

Therefore when I complain about stereotyped characters, let me not forget the giant upon whose shoulders today’s feisty heroines stand.

But… moan… moan. Just about every bit of dialogue is exposition – characters relating the plot to one another for our benefit. There’s a chase at the end which struck me as borderline silly. In fact the whole plot is borderline silly particularly the romantic element. I thought the narrator summed the whole thing up wonderfully when, swimming out into the bay for purposes of her own towards the end of the story, she says: ‘behind me was an alien land where I had behaved foolishly’. Well, yes.

Much more exciting though I have discovered README.txt the new memoire by intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning which I am currently reading. This is much more my style. I shall be reviewing this one shortly.

Nonfiction November Week 5: New to my TBR

And now, the end is here!

It’s been a feast of Nonfiction which is what November is all about. As well as the first proper frost which has done for my poor Gunnera (I know, I know, I should have covered it) November has been a month of taking stock and trying to finish my own manuscript.

Jaymi is our host this week and here’s our prompt:

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!

A big thank you to all the bloggers who hosted Nonfiction November as below:

It’s been a feast of potential reads and impossible to choose only a few but I have to choose only a few because I’m not a fast reader. These are the ones I’m hopefully going to be reading over the next few months.

Laura @ Reading in Bed The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

English Pastoral, An Inheritance James Rebanks – Margaret @ Books Please

Maya Dusenbery Doing Harm – Rennie @Whats Nonfiction?

Me by Elton John Kristin @ KristinKravesBooks

Kristin recommends listening to the audiobook version of this as it is narrated by Taron Edgerton who played Elton in the film Rocketman.

And not published until 2022. The Book of Hope by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams by Diana @ Thoughts on Papyrus

The Woman who Wasn’t There: The True Story of An Incredible Deception by Robin Gaby Fisher anbd Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. at Christopher from Plucked From the Stacks

I’m excited to read some of these wonderful recommendations. Meanwhile I’m taking a break from nonfiction and reading Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Nonfiction November Week 4 Stranger than Fiction?

Week 4: (November 22-26) – Stranger Than Fiction with Christopher at Plucked from the Stacks: This week we’re focusing on all the great nonfiction books that *almost* don’t seem real. A sports biography involving overcoming massive obstacles, a profile on a bizarre scam, a look into the natural wonders in our world—basically, if it makes your jaw drop, you can highlight it for this week’s topic.

So many narratives labelled as fiction start as someone’s truth. Even a book that is not expressly based on a ‘true story’ will have been influenced by the perusal of ten thousand news reports and by the imbibing of our own and other people’s stories.

Spy stories are a case in point.

One of the best World War 2 spy books I have read is A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell. Just as exciting as any of the great tales of male derring do to emerge from the war, and certainly just as exciting as any James Bond stuff, this extraordinary story of survival and courage by Virginia Hall, at a time when women were far more likely to be scrubbing doorsteps than fighting behind enemy lines, definitely qualifies in the stranger than fiction category.

When I reviewed this book, I wrote:

This ‘staying one step ahead’ at one stage involved Hall having to travel to Perpignan and cross the Pyrenees in midwinter in order to reach Spain which was, at least officially, neutral. This unimaginable feat – with a prosthesis – this treacherous crossing that had felled plenty of fit and able young men:

“sometimes escape parties would come across a frozen corpse, occasionally in an upright position, gazing forward with a fixed stare.”

was undertaken by Hall with the slimmest chance of survival, along with an unfriendly guide and two other men, even as the Wehrmacht combed the town behind her with sniffer dogs.

***

Then there are the rags to riches stories, people overcoming the greatest odds to make a huge success of their lives. These are much beloved of fiction writers but I love a real life story of transformation.

One such is Coco Chanel, the designer who rose from a childhood of deprivation and neglect in turn of the century France, to reinvent herself to ‘become one of the most influential women of her century’. Lisa Chaney writes in her biography of the great fashion designer Chanel: An Intimate Life:

“… physical hardship, constant upheaval and a dysfunctional parental relationship were their lot. Little Gabrielle’s [Chanel’s birth name] response to this seems clear: she was angry. As a way of incorporating and managing her predicament she resorted to the healthy habit of childhood, make-believe. Years later she told of acting out her fantasies in an overgrown Courpiere Churchyard over which she ruled and where the dead were her subjects.”

I found Chaney’s book to be a little plodding on some occasions – I can’t imagine that is an epithet one could ever have applied to the woman who was its subject. The book also places a great deal of emphasis on Chanel’s relationships – the clue is in the title – of which she had many apparently with both men and women. But I find these aspects of her life less interesting than her work. Coco was famously enigmatic and so perhaps not the easiest person to write about.

My next book in the stranger than fiction category is Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. I have spoken about this book quite a lot on this blog and continued to be shocked by its revelations long after I closed the last page. This is the ultimate stranger than fiction book – no-one believed the events that led to the opioid crisis. You couldn’t make it up. Could you? Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say there were some who chose not to believe the evidence of their own eyes. The true cost of the opioid scandal was brought into heart-rending relief by the poet and author Ocean Vuong – who lost a dear friend to OxyContin – in his autobiographical book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Attempted investigations into opioids came up against the massive power of the pharmaceutical industry and its governmental supporters. When action could have been taken that might have saved tens of thousands of people becoming addicted to this strong drug, that action was not taken. OxyContin cut a swathe through the US for 20 years. By then it was too late to stop the opioid scandal which continues to worsen to this day – given the added stress and isolation of the pandemic.