Week 1 (10/30-11/3) Your Year in Nonfiction: Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?
I love reading nonfiction but it takes me much longer to read than fiction because of the detail involved. It’s only been 13% of my total reading so far this year. These are the books I read:
Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley – review to follow
Virginia Woolf vol 1 by Quentin Bell – review to follow
I enjoyed them all, but the outstanding book for me is Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken, subtitled ‘Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … And Why Can’t We Stop?’ I kept hearing about ultra processed food, but had little idea what exactly it is, so when I saw this book I thought it would be ideal – and it’s by Chris van Tulleken, who has impressed me on numerous TV programmes on nutrition. It is absolutely fascinating and a real eye opener!
By participating in Nonfiction November I’m hoping this will encourage me to read more nonfiction rather than picking up the next novel to read and I’m looking forward to seeing what others recommend.
Each Monday, our weekly host will post our topic prompt and include a linkup where you can link your posts, connect with other bloggers, and dive deeper by reading and sharing nonfiction book reviews.
Here are the topic prompts for each week:
Week 1 (10/30-11/3) Your Year in Nonfiction: Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? (Heather)
Week 2 (11/6-11/10) Choosing Nonfiction: What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to? Do you have a particular writing style that works best? When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking. (Frances)
Week 3 (11/13-11/17) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)
Week 4 (11/20-11/24) Worldview Shapers: One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone? (Rebekah)
Week 5 (11/27-12/1) 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! (Lisa)
Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.
I’m featuring Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham one of the Chunksters I wrote about in this post. I bought this book in 2008 and I still haven’t read it – probably because it is such a big thick book of 700 pages that it is really unwieldy, hard to hold and so tightly bound I can hardly open it. And the print is quite small!
Book Beginning:
The day broke grey and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow.
Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
Page 56:
And tonight he sank on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and prayed to God with all his might that He would make his clubfoot whole. It was a very small thing beside the moving of mountains. He knew that God could do it if he wished, and his own faith was complete. Next morning, finishing his prayers with the same request, he fixed a date for the miracle.
Description from Goodreads:
Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham’s masterpieces. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor.
And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.
~~~
What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?
I’ve got a lot of long books over 500 pages long and I keep putting off reading them because of their length, but they do take up a lot of space on the bookshelves. The ones shown above are just some of them and I’m hoping to start reading at least a few of them in the months to come.
Maybe I’ll start with one of the two books by Ken Follett:
Fall of Giants is the first book in his Century Trilogy, following five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women.
Or
World Without End, the second Kingsbridge book, set two centuries after the townspeople finished building the Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth (my review).
Or it could be one of the others, as my fancy takes me.
If you’ve read any of these books I’d love to know what you think about them.
The one at the bottom of the middle pile is Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.
The topic this week is Books with Weather Events in the Title/on the Cover. A list of titles with weather-related words in them like storm, rain, blizzard, flood, lightning, hail, snow, wind, etc. OR covers with lightning/storms in the picture.
I’ve chosen books with weather events in the titles and on the covers. All but one are books I’ve read and enjoyed.The links go to my posts on the books.
Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves, the fourth in her Shetland Island Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It’s set on Fair Isle, his home island. With the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Perez investigates a murder at the Bird Observatory.
The Body in the Ice by A J Mackenzie, the 2nd Hardcastle and Chaytor Mystery set in Romney Marsh and the surrounding countryside in 1796-7 when the winter was exceptionally harsh and cold and on Christmas Day a body is found, frozen in a pond. There’s no modern technology, just old-fashioned crime detection and deduction and a certain amount of intuition.
By Sword and Storm by Margaret Skea, the third book in the Munro Saga. It’s historical fiction set in 1598 when Adam Munro and his family were living in France as the French Wars of Religion drew to an end. Adam is a colonel in the Scots Gardes, an elite Scottish regiment whose duties included the provision of a personal bodyguard to the French King, Henri IV.
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble, a novel exploring the ending of life, and the nature of ageing, centring around Fran Stubbs, and set against a backdrop of rising floods in Britain and in the Canaries. It looks at the effects of the influx of immigrantsarriving by boat to the Canaries from Africa and of the effect of the tremor off the small Canary Island of El Hierro on the tides.
A Deadly Thaw by Sarah Ward, the second in the Francis Sadler series set in the fictional town of Bampton in Derbyshire. In 2004 Lena Fisher was arrested for suffocating her husband, Andrew. In 2016, a year after Lena’s release from prison, Andrew was found dead in a disused mortuary.
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell. A novel set in July 1976 when London is in the grip of a heatwave. (It was not just London, because I remember it very well where I was living in Cheshire in the north-west.) Gretta’s husband pops out of the house to buy a newspaper – but he doesn’t come back – this is a story of a family in crisis.
The Mist by Ragnar Jonasson, Nordic Noir. Jonasson’s writing brings the scenery and the weather to life – you can feel the isolation and experience what it is like to be lost in a howling snowstorm. The emotional tension is brilliantly done too, the sense of despair, confusion and dread is almost unbearable.
Rain by Melissa Harrison, a ‘meditation on the English landscape in wet weather.’ She describes four walks in the rain over four seasons, across Wicken Fen, Shropshire, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor.
The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves, the 10th Vera Stanhope mystery novel. It’s set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a tidal island just off the coast of Northumberland, only accessible across a causeway when the tide is out. Vera and her team investigate the death of Rick Kelsall who was discovered hanged from the rafters of his small bedroom on the island.
Snowblind by Ragnar Jonasson, more Nordic Noir, set in the tiny town of Siglufjördur in Iceland, accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason, a rookie policeman, investigates the deaths of a young woman found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer who fell to his death in the local theatre. This is one of my TBRs.
which for me is Fair Stood the Wind for France by H E Bates. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by Sunday the 3rd December2023.
Synopsis from Amazon
When John Franklin brings his plane down into Occupied France at the height of the Second World war, there are two things in his mind – the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. It is a stroke of unbelievable luck when the family of a French farmer risk their lives to offer the airmen protection. During the hot summer weeks that follow, the English officer and the daughter of the house are drawn inexorably to each other.
I’m looking forward to reading it.
Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?
BooksPlease 