For those that follow my blog, you’ll already know that I am a big fan of non-fiction. It makes up around 80% of the books that I read. The genres that I like the most are travel and natural history, but I also like reading books on subjects as diverse as economics, history, architecture, spies, technology and I even read maths books.
While a lot of bloggers and Booktubers read fiction, there are some out there that read non-fiction and six years ago they started talking about the non-fiction they liked to read and thought that the best way to promote it was to have a specific time of the year to persuade people to pick up at least one non-fiction title in that month, and #NonfictionNovember was created.
I would love to see more people reading non-fiction. Rather than them being like reading a dry textbook for school, the very best books can be as good as the fiction out there. One of the biggest advocates of this is Olive, who can be found here on YouTube. Her video for this year’s event is here.
In this, she details some of the prompts that they suggest to help guide you in selecting titles to read and they are:
Time
Movement
Buzz
Discovery
As Olive says in the video, these are guides for you to interpret in any way you see fit and they can be a loose as you want! So I thought that I would suggest some of the books that I have read that fit these:
Time
Timekeepers – Simon Garfield
A Time of Gifts – Patrick leigh Fermor
Secondhand Time – Svetlana Alexievich
Time and Place – Alexandra Harris
Movement
Move Along Please – Mark Mason
Nightwalk – Chris Yates
The Pull Of the River – Matt Gaw
Around the World in 80 Trains – Monisha Rajesh
Buzz
A Buzz In The Meadow – Dave Goulson
Dancing with Bees – Brigit Strawbridge Howard
Extraordinary Insects – Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
Magnificent Desolation – Buzz Aldrin
Discovery
Strands – Jean Sprackland
Mucdlarking – Lara Maiklem
The Invention of Nature – Andrea Wulf
Gathering Carrageen – Monica Connell
They are my suggestions. What do you think of them? What would you pick to meet those prompts? Most importantly, are you going to be joining in by reading a non-fiction book this month?
You can follow #NonfictionNovember on these various social media sites:
TikTok: @NonfictionNovember
Great to see you here in Nonfiction November, as I’d expect. I’m only a 40-55% nonfiction reader but that still seems to make me unusual. I like the prompts as a way to explore things: I just went through my list to see what most stuck out! Happy Nonfiction November – I won’t manage ALL nonfiction as I’m doing the Australia Lit Month challenge and have a novel for that …
How could I not take part in it! My first book finished this month was science fiction, and now I am reading poetry. Not even I read all non-fiction each month. Mixing things up is good