Nonfiction November

 Hello Interwebs!

Happy almost Halloween! I can't believe it's almost the end of October and I've posted exactly nothing on my blog this month. I have a whole slew of book reviews and other posts that need to happen soon. Recently motivation has been such an issue for me recently. All I want to do is sleep and go to work but hopefully this reading challenge will give me the motivation to do some good reading. 

Nonfiction November is something I found out about through a YouTube channel I've recently discovered abookolive. She mostly reads and reviews nonfiction books. Nonfiction November is run by Olive (abookolive), Sabrina (Deliciously Autumnal Banana), Natalie (Curious Reader), Jill (The Book Bully), and Andreea (Infinite Text) and it is exactly what it sounds like, for the month of November you read as much nonfiction as you want to. There's a variety of social media platforms involved and things happening on all of them. 

Twitter

Instagram

goodreads

and TicToc, which is @NonfictionNovember. 

So here's abookolive's introductory post which outlines everything very well including everything I'm going to try to convey in my own clunky kind of way. Announcing Nonfiction November. The only requirement to participate is that you read one nonfiction book during November. I'm planning on trying to read one for each of the four prompts as well as the group book. The four prompts are:

1. Time
2. Movement
3. Buzz
4. Discovery

Each prompt is open to any interpretation you wand to give them. They can be a word in the title/subtitle of the book, it could be a book about the subject, or any other interpretation of it. Time can refer to the vague cosmological concept of time or a time period, movement can be literal physical movement or a pollical/social movement, buzz can be about something literally buzzy, such as bees or sound or it can be a popular book that has a lot of buzz about it, and discovery could be a scientific discovery or a discovery of something personal or anything you'd like. 

Finally there's the group book The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. The readalong of this book will begin on November 1st and from November 1-18, the goal is to read two chapters a day and the main chat will happen the weekend of November 21-22. 

So for Nonfiction November I have picked four books that can fit into each category as well as a number of alternates to fit into each category. So here's my definite TBR. 

• Group Read: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (2019). This is a memoir about home and family set in a neglected New Orleans neighborhood. In 1961, the author's mother bought a house in the New Orleans East neighborhood. It follows the family's struggles using the house as a backdrop until it was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. 
  
  
  
• Time: Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s by Jennifer Worth. I chose this book (and I might read the two sequels to it as well depending on time) for time because it is very distinctively set in a particular time period, the 1950s. I also like the idea of memoirs for time because they are all about remembering times gone by. 
  
  
  
• Movement: Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacobs. This is my pick for movement because this book is a memoir by a first generation American. There is a lot about immigration in this memoir since the author's parents are immigrants which gives it a strong theme of movement both worldwide and on a social scale. This book is also written as a graphic novel and the art style gives me a very real sense of movement within the pages of the physical book. 
  
  
  
• Buzz: My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This is a buzz-worthy book because of Justice Ginsburg's untimely death recently and the drama surrounding her successor on the Supreme Court. I have been meaning to read this book which is a collection of her writings and speeches and other wisdom for a long time and this is the perfect opportunity. 
  
  
  
• Discovery: The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel. This book is about Dr. Martin Couney, a man who used incubators and skilled nurses to help keep premature infants alive when they were originally doomed, but at the same time he displayed the babies in their incubators as sideshows to carnivals, such as the one on Coney Island. These "museums" with babies on display in incubators was touched on in a book I read earlier this year, Rachel Beanland's Florence Adler Swims Forever, and when I saw this book on the Kindle Daily Deals I was intrigued. 
  
  
  

Those are my for sure books for Nonfiction November. A nice grouping on a variety of subject matters. In case I still want more nonfiction or anything I start doesn't end up striking my fancy. 

TIME: For all my time selections I went for memoirs and biographies that focus on particular times or moments in history, both from a broader historical perspective or from a personal one, except for the last book on this list which focuses on a time period.

• The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne. This is a biography of Jane Austen, probably the best known author of life in the Edwardian Era in England. This is about both the time period of her life and the Edwardian Era as a time period. 
  
  
  
  
• Between Two Fires: Intimate Writings on Life, Love, Food, and Flavor by Laura Esquivel. This is a memoir by Laura Esquivel talking about the time period of her life. 
  
  
  
  
• Below Stairs by Margaret Powell. This is the memoir of a kitchen maid that inspired the TV show Downton Abbey. This memoir was the definitive work about a group of people, domestic servants, that kept England moving for a long time, and this sparked the end of the time of Domestic Servants.
  
  
  
  
• Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years by David Litt.  This is a memoir by one of President Obama's speechwriters about his time spent as Obama's speechwriter during the presidency. 
  
  
  
  
• The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum. This book is about the beginning of Forensic Medicine during the Jazz Age in New York. It's about a specific series of events during a specific time period. I suppose this book could also work for discovery.
  
  
  
  

MOVEMENT: My other selections for movement mainly focus on social movements but the third selection also involves physical movement. 

• Stonewall by Martin Duberman. This is about the Stonewall riots that sparked the first pride parade and the LGBTQIA rights movement in the US.
  
  
  
  
• Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. This is a book about the feminist movement and specifically about women of color who get forgotten by the movement a lot. 
  
  
  
  
• The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. This book is about a group of 26 men who attempted to cross the Arizona desert between the US and Mexico in 2001 and the 12 that came out of the desert again. This book involves both physical movement in the action of crossing the desert ot enter the US from Mexico and social movements in the themes of immigration, both legal and illegal.
  
  
  
  

BUZZ: I went with both current events and a book that inspired a popular Netflix show as being buzzworthy topics. 

• A People's History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution by Peter Irons. This book covers the history of the Supreme Court of the United States and how they shape our interpretations of the constitution. This is obviously buzzworthy with the recent death of Justice Ginsburg and the filling of her seat on the court.  
  
  
  
  
• Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman. This is the memoir of a woman who escaped from her very conservative Hasidic community that was recently turned into a very popular (and buzzworthy) Netflix series. 
  
  
  
  
• Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen. I got this book after seeing a lecture by the author at OMSI here in Oregon. This book is about infections in the animal kingdom and how they related to human pandemics. Very buzzworthy considering the current COVID-19 pandemic. 
  
  
  
  
• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry. This is a book about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Buzzworthy for reasons that should be obvious. 
  
  
  
  

DISCOVERY: I interpret discovery to involve both scientific discoveries and discovery in a crime sense, as in discovering "whodunnit". 

• Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox to the Killer Bean of Calabar by Peter Macinnis. This is a book about the science of poisons and their applications in things such as medicine and cosmetics. 
  
  
  
  
• Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen. This is a true crime story about Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard who ran a "clinic" that touted a "fasting cure" for just about anything that ailed you. In reality Dr. Hazzard was a quack who stole from her patients before her "cure" killed. 
  
  
  
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. This is back to the idea of scientific discovery and specifically the anthropological ideas of what causes human societies to succeed and fail. I was introduced to Diamond through a couple selections from this book and I've read another one of his similar books, Collapse. 
  
  
  
  

So that's my whole TBR for Nonfiction November, both my definite TBR and my alternate selections as well as my reasoning for each book. I'm very excited to delve into some nonfiction this November and I hope you all will join me!

Happy Reading!