2017’s Nonfiction November is hosted by Katie at Doing Dewey, Lory at Emerald City Book Review, Julie at Julz Reads, and Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness!

This final week is hosted by (Lory at Emerald City Book Review)

Which amazing non-fiction books have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book!

Here is a sampling of the books I’ve added to my TBR througout this event:

Julie @ Julz Reads Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
Raidergirl @ An Adventure in Reading Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Eva @ The Paperback Princess Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Yongue
Susie @ Novel Visits Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
JoAnn @ Lakeside Musing Grocery by Michael Ruhlman and Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook
Sarah @ Sarah’s Book Shelves What Made Maddy Run by Kate Fagan

This week, I’ve also started reading Sherman Alexie’s new memoir, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me. 

Inspired by his interview with Eleanor Wachtel, on CBC Radio’s “Writers & Company”, this is a book which I knew I wanted to buy in hardcover.

The journey he undertook in writing this painful and reflective work is remarkable. The following passage introduces readers to his mother.

“My late mother, Lillian Alexie, crafted legendary quilts and was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal [Spokane] language. She was small, just under five feet tall when she died. And she was so beautiful and verbose and brilliant she could have played a fictional version of herself in a screwball Hollywood comedy if Hollywood had ever bothered to cast real Indians as fictional Indians.”

He is clear to say that his memory is unreliable, that he as a narrator is unreliable, and, yet, these admissions of his subjectivity only draw me in the narrative further and more quickly.

This is another instance in which an author whose fiction I have enjoyed pulls me into non-fiction. But I did say, when the month began, that I have a tendency to fall into writers’ memoirs, so this is reading in my comfort zone. It is, nonetheless, immediately engaging and evocative, qualities which many readers appreciate in non-fiction as well as fiction.

Is there some non-fiction in your reading stack just now?