Another Nonfiction November has flown by! How has your month been? Jaymi @ The OC Bookgirl is our host for our final week: 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’d been holding off on posting my list in the hopes I could get around to some more posts, but I think I have to admit defeat. Here’s what I’ve added so far: Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Rob Brotherton – Christopher @ Plucked from the Stacks Mysterious America: The Ul ..read more

Week 3 of Nonfiction November time! I love combing through people’s posts to get recommendations on this topic, it’s such a favorite. Here’s a reminder of our prompt, courtesy of Christopher @ Plucked from the Stacks: Stranger Than Fiction (November 14-18): 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. But as much as I love it, this was an u ..read more

Happy Halloween, and happy first day of Nonfiction November! The wonderful Katie @Doing Dewey is our host this week: 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? As always, I try to explore my reading trends for the year rather than getting too deep into favorit ..read more

Have you read anything spooky scary this month for Molly’s Frighteningly Good Reads? My second book for the event this year quickly became one of my favorite frightening reads: Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man’s Search For the Truth About Ghosts. British journalist Will Storr begins this undertaking into supernatural research with the idea that he wants to learn more about the people who believe in various aspects of the supernatural and while doing so, figure out whether he, a skeptic, can be convinced of these things as well. And if not, to determine what rational or scientific expla ..read more

Every once in awhile I go on a spree of visiting my old home of France in my mind by reading a bunch of books about it. I did this over the summer again by finally picking up Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, the book that kicked off the trend in recent decades of Anglos writing about their quirky experiences of moving to France, often to the countryside. This is the granddaddy of that genre. I’d read one of his Provence-centric books many years ago in preparation for the first time I ever visited France and although I don’t remember much of it, I do remember that I wasn’t impressed or intere ..read more

Last year, I read nephrologist Dr. Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code, which it was eye-opening for me. It made me realize that something I sometimes did naturally or inadvertently — skipping meals or snacks — was actually a benefiting weight loss. It clicked for me, because in the periods I’d inadvertently fasted — either from being overly busy with work or, unfortunately, due to anxiety, I lost the most weight and felt best while doing so. That book presented the best scientific explanation of how weight gain and loss work in understandable layman’s language that I’ve come across. Since more cons ..read more

Journalist Sarah Kendzior has always had an unfortunately prescient ability of reading the writing on the wall when it comes to the direction that political winds are blowing in America. Currently based in St. Louis, her 2018 book The View From Flyover Country brilliantly captured a part of America that the media often overlooks, and did so to its detriment leading up to the 2016 election. In those essays, Kendzior eloquently explained In her latest, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, she further explores how America isn’t so starkly divided into red and blue, it ..read more

Reading New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv’s debut, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (September 13, 2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I realized I had an unintentional trend this year of reading about selfhood in some form. It started with the first book I read in the year, Will Storr’s Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us (more on it later). Aviv’s book is a set of profiles/case studies on various forms of mental illness connected to questions around self and identity, but which also don’t respond to conventional therapies, whe ..read more

It’s the most wonderful time of year again! Time to celebrate stories filled with facts and footnotes, truth being stranger than fiction, and very, very long subtitles. That’s right: Nonfiction November is coming! Here’s the lineup for this year: 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 particip ..read more

I love history that digs into something that was absolutely massive during its day and now is essentially unknown and forgotten. It always makes me wonder what the same things will be from our era. Sarah Horowitz’s The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All (September 6, Sourcebooks) does exactly that to a woman who was once notorious in France but today is merely a footnote. A shame, because the story of Marguerite “Meg” Steinheil is quite the story. Social climber and “society courtesan” Meg married a much older painter, Adolphe Steinheil, although was never par ..read more