It’s non-fiction November usually the happiest (book) time of year!
Okay here’s a confession I used to get non-fiction confused with fiction because naturally I thought non-fiction meant… not true and fiction was true. Obviously I figured that out. Sometime in college I think but otherwise I thought I’d recommend some good not fiction books I’ve read recently.
Allie Brosh is just one of those authors who I feel like I have a lot in common with and we would just get each other. This was the long awaited follow up to her book Hyperbole and a Half and while I think this one was more melancholy because of what Brosh has been through and talks about (the death of her sister for one) I still think it’s a lovely relatable book.
Plus she manages to walk a line I think can only be walked in life where you talk in one chapter about the painful loss while in another remember the strange friendship your sister had as a child.
Both books are good reads if you’re going through a hard time and want to reconnect with the good ones.
Remember that time Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes writer) solved crime? Yeah I wasn’t there either and he didn’t so much solve it as work for years with many others to expose the massive police fuck-ups and cover-up that had put an innocent man into a horrible Scottish prison for most of his life early in the 1900s.
If you like Conan Doyle or crime/legal books you’ll enjoy this. But I also think it’s a good treatise on history and classism and immigration. So it kind of does all those things in a super fast read.
I read Hood Feminism over the summer so it’s not necessarily as fresh in my mind. But the author has a strong voice she deals with multiple issues throughout the novel and made me see them in a different light.
I think the important thing to take from this one is you need to take everyone into account and even if you’re sincerely trying to help, you need to actually listen to the people on the ground and just as importantly not all solutions fit everyone and we all need to step back and listen to the people on the ground instead of just imposing our will and solutions.
Which is pretty much something that could apply to all discourse in this country at this point.
Erik Larson is one of those authors that has been on my TBR forever in pretty much every book he’s released I’ve been like, oh, I want to read that and then I never do! I finally broke the streak with The Splendid and the Vile last month.
It’s about Churchill and his family but also a bit of a slice of life in London during the Blitz.
I found it very readable even despite it’s length and density. Hell I even already ordered Dead Wake. I mean it will probably take me years to get to it but still Splendid and the Vile was a first rate read (and great title) I definitely won’t keep sleeping on Larson.