Nonfiction November 1: My Year in Nonfiction

Hosted by Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness, week 1's topic for Nonfiction November is to take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What is one topic or type of nonfiction you haven’t read enough of yet? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I have not read much nonfiction this year, which is really not a surprise as I haven't read much at all - only 31 books, roughly 40 books down from a normal (as in pre-child) year. The nonfiction I have read, however, has been wonderful:

Warrior Women: An Archaeologists search for History's Hidden Heroines by Jeannine Davis-Kimball is an accessible, academic, and narrative tale about Davis-Kimball's archaeological discovery of evidence indicating...you guessed it Warrior Women. The book is brimming with interesting tidbits that are both entertaining and insightful.

Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia: Oh my Jehoshaphat ladies and gents, this book was crazy reading. I was horrified, I was morbidly awed, I was politically outraged, I was personally offended, I was arrogantly disbelieving, I was floored. In a nutshell, it is about a incestuous, narcissistic, bible-thumping madman who homesteads in Alaska with his brainwashed wife and 15 kids, and ends up taking on the National Park Service and the law for his sins. 

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke the book is a collection of letters Rilke wrote to a young poet named Franz Xaver Kappus. These are life lessons from the truly deep mind of a man who believed in solitude as the great tool of the artist. Every line is infused with a truth that is beautiful, arguable, and insightful. 

Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit by Robert Bogdan focuses on the heyday of Freak Shows, 1840-1940. Bogdan covers the history of the presentation of freaks in conjunction with the circus, dime museums, carnivals, world fairs, the amusement industry in general. The book focuses on a simple but powerful argument: "How we view people who are different has less to do with what they are physiologically than with who we are culturally." My review of this one will be up later this week.

Stitches by David Small: Emotionally smacking me in the face on page 12, Stitches hooked me in and I devoured this intense graphic novel in about 20 minutes. Small mirrors form and content, using minimal words to relate a story about loss of voice (both literal and figurative). The images really shine here, telling as much of the story, if not more, than the actual text. 

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, a collection of letters between Hanff and a used-book seller in London, unveils a friendship that lasted 20 years. Hanff's quirky personality and Frank's blend of the personal and the professional really add life to their letters. Whether they were talking about books, family, or the odd tidbit, I was consistently interested in what they had to say. And I liked this one so much I actually chose it for my nonfiction selection for Introduction to Literature.

My favorite of the above is difficult to pin-down as they are remarkably different books. Warrior Women and Freak Show are academic, informative, fascinating books; Letters, Stitches, and 84 are lyrical and deep. But Pilgrim's Wilderness will haunt me - has  haunted me - and it is the one I am most likely to recommend to others. 

My plans for nonfiction reading include another book about freak shows - Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson which I've already started but I may be a bit "freaked" out right now. Then I plan on attacking two books on literary theory, textbooks for my Graduate Studies in Literary Theory course, which sounds geeky and fantastic. I also have a small stack of nonfiction I hope to read in the next month or so - and a giant shelf of them I hope to read in the next year.

So are you guys participating in Nonfiction November? What has your nonfiction reading been like this year?