A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life
I’m in the middle of reading The Long Goodbye by Meaghan O’Rourke, the story of O’Rourke’s experiences after her mother’s death from at age 55. While I don’t actively seek out memoirs about grief, it seems like they have been a big part of my reading lately.
About a month ago, I read an article in the New York Times where O’Rourke and Joyce Carol Oates discuss why they chose to write about their own losses, and why books about loss can resonate with readers.
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This is, I think, the oddest Narrative Nonfiction 5 list that I’ve put together. I’m not really that passionate about ocean creatures, but I just happened to see a lot of books on this topic come out recently that looked interesting, and the list sort of fell together from there. And, I have a special guest recommendation from a friend Erin, a science journalism student at UW-Madison where I did my Master’s.
But enough with the introduction, on to the books!
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I’m not sure if Halloween ranks as my favorite holiday, but it’s definitely up in the top few. And the whole nature of Halloween lends itself to lots of good and spooky nonfiction. In honor of this awesome holiday, I’ve got a Narrative Nonfiction 5 list that I hope you’ll enjoy. The list features books from authors Mary Roach, Deb Blum, John Berendt, Wade Davis, and Karen Palmer.
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My love for football and great narrative sports writing have come up a couple of times on the blog, which makes today – the first game of the NFL season – the perfect day for a Narrative Nonfiction 5 on pro football.
Come tonight, I’ll be settled in with my roommate watching the Minnesota Vikings take on the New Orleans Saints and cheering for the team that consistently breaks my heart. I can’t wait.
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This is a little bit of a nontraditional Narrative Nonfiction 5 list, since I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call most of these books “narrative nonfiction.” They’re more classic nonfiction, even though the bits I’ve read of each do have a conversational style that I really appreciate.
The books on this list are all responses to the fact that technology is changing us as individuals and a society – some think for the better, and some think for the worse. Ever since I started my new job (working for a engineering trade magazine), it seems I can’t get enough of this discussion, and wanted to share some of the books I’m most excited about reading with you.
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I’ve been interested in food and reading about food for the last several months. While I’m not a farmer or a gardener myself, I do love the local farmers’ market and how much great, fresh, local produce I can get when it’s not freezing here in the Midwest.
But there are people who do a lot more than just go to the farmers’ market each Saturday — they go all out to change their lives and their food. This Narrative Nonfiction 5 lists is about memoirs and nonfiction written by people who have taken back their food by going back to the farm.
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Since March is Women’s History Month, I decided to do my second Narrative Nonfiction 5 list on female writers that use this form. When the New Journalism of the 1960s stared, there weren’t many women writing as part of the moment but in the years since it’s opened up and you can find women writing really amazing narrative nonfiction on a host of subjects.
I gathered this list from scouring the index of True Stories by Norman Sims. I haven’t read books by all of the authors, but (predictably) researching for this list has made me really want to try them!
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The inaugural edition of Narrative Nonfiction 5 features five books by authors that went in-depth covering “current” events in the United States. I put current in quotes because most of these books are more than 10 years old, which makes current a bit of a stretch. Still, I’m fairly confident many of these issues haven’t changed so much that the lessons of the story aren’t relevant today.
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One goal I set for myself this year is to do more with nonfiction on my blog. One way I’ve decided to do that is through a new semi-weekly feature: Narrative Nonfiction 5. Every few weeks or so, Narrative Nonfiction 5 will feature a list of five nonfiction books on a particular theme.
As the title suggests, I’m focusing specifically on narrative nonfiction. That term can encompass a lot of things, but for me it means nonfiction books that use techniques of fiction — plot, characters, dialogue, symbolism — to tell a good, true, story.
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