It’s Friday and time for Armchair BEA‘s Topic of Choice. While I love novels and adore short stories, I’d like to spend a few minutes on a “genre” that doesn’t seem to get a lot of love from the book-blogging community: Non-fiction.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that everything is narrative. We’re creatures of tale-telling. For better or worse, we make sense of the world by framing things in the form of stories. We want cause and effect. We want a beginning, a middle, and, most importantly, an ending.
When we watch sports, we like to hear about the athlete’s back-story and give dramatic structure to a game’s ebb and flow. We want scientific inquiry to be discrete, and while story-telling is good for creating hypotheses, it’s bad when we need to re-evaluate conclusions. Who wants to continually re-write the ending? One of the most interesting aspects about dealing with a chronic illness is the fact that the story of my arthritis has no conclusion and people are uncomfortable with that. When we talk of being sick it’s in terms of “getting better” and “beating it.” It doesn’t quite make sense when there is no good ending.
I’ve also found non-fiction to be more satisfying lately because, as an author, I need to know how the world works. I believe in a orderly world. If you know the systems, you can apply them. I’d really like to write a historical fiction about Omaha in the early 1900s involving several magicians who lived at the time. Not only has my research included them, but the city, the magic and technology of the era, economics, religion… It’s a long list of stories within stories!
So, here are links to some of the non-fiction I’ve really enjoyed, the best of best perhaps. Click on the covers for links to Goodreads.
History
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Other Topics
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Memoirs
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Do you blog about non-fiction? What non-fiction surprises have you read?