Hey, look! The Nonfiction Recommendation Engine is back, and this time with a snazzy new header. Thanks PicMonkey! With this feature, I ask readers to fill out a short list of questions that I’ll use to develop a couple of personalized book recommendations. But my real hope with the series is that other readers will jump in with recommendations in the comments, making each post a great resource for nonfiction reads. You can catch up with Part I, Part II and Part III by following those links.

The first request this week is from Jessica at The Bluestocking Society: 

I am looking for a book on goal setting, philosophy or autobiography, similar to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (loved it), Getting Things Done by David Allen (loved it) or The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (liked it).

I am addicted to the science-y, self-help books that talk about how to be a better, more productive person, so I have plenty to offer. I’m going to share one book I have read and one that I have not.

The first is Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus and Sharpen Your Creative Mind, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei. This book is a collection of short essays by “leading creative minds” about how to create time during a hectic work environment. The essays are divided into four sections: building a rock-solid routine, finding focus in a distracted world, taming your tools, and sharpening your creative mind. I like this one because it shows how real people have developed strategies for making time for important work.

The second is What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast by Laura Vanderkam. This book is a collection of three shorter ebooks Vanderkam published that look at strategies for maximizing mornings, weekends and work. I’ve read the section on weekends, which gave me many good ideas about planning to make weekends more invigorating. I’m looking forward to the rest.

The second request this week is from Nikki at Book Pairing: 

I adore books that get behind scientific discoveries and the people who made them. I’m certainly not a scientist in my own right, but something about how these discoveries are made is fascinating. And, as much as it goes with it, I love histories of food and how culture is all tied up into that. Love love love it. Some books that I’ve recently enjoyed on this topic are A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (one of my favorites ever), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and Cooked by Michael Pollan. I love nonfiction that has an emphasis on the narrative just as much as the academic facts. I want to learn stuff, but I want to learn it in the same way I learn things in novels.

This is a fun request, since I love these sorts of books too. Right now I’m reading one that I think fits your first request, The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis by Thomas Goetz. This one is out on April 3 from Gotham, and tells the real life detective story of how Conan Doyle exposed the shaky science behind a supposed cure for consumption. I’m only about 30 pages in, but I love it so far.

My second suggestion is another one I’ve only read bits and pieces of, but heard wonderful things about — The Man Who Couldn’t Eat by Jon Renier. In this memoir, Renier writes about his battle with Crohn’s disease and his experience when a life-saving surgery makes it so he cannot eat at all. The magazine article that inspired the book won the James Beard Foundation Award for Magazine Feature Writing, which is another good sign in its favor.

Interested in getting a personalized nonfiction recommendation? Please fill out this form to get on the list. I currently have four requests in my queue. 

Photo Credit: Chris at Shutterhacks

Yesterday, NPR Books (via All Things Considered, I think) asked people a surprisingly awesome question about books:

.@npratc wants to know: what 3 books summarize YOU? Make a snapshot of your life? Would let a bookshelf-spying stranger "get" you? #my3books

— NPR Books (@nprbooks) March 25, 2014

I added my response to Twitter, but felt like expanding it a little bit more in a blog post. Here are my three books:

The Harry Potter series – This feels like cheating, just a little bit. If I had to pick just one of them it’d be the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but really they’re all my book. This series was the series of my young adult/new adulthood and I have so many memories tied to these characters and this franchise. Plus, choosing this series would tell a stranger about my love for fantasy and magic in my stories.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman – I’ve always loved good nonfiction writing, but I think The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was the first book I read where I thought, “Yes! This is the writing I love.” It’s a beautifully complicated but compassionately told story that changed the way that I think.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell – I thought long and hard about what fiction book to put on this list. I wanted something that was smart with beautiful writing, but that also was a little weird – not straight “literary fiction.” I picked this one because the ending of this story – even though you know exactly what is coming – was like an emotional punch in the stomach. I loved this book.

I imagine there are a lot of combinations of three books that I could have picked that get at this trifecta – a book loved in my youth, a book loved as narrative nonfiction, and a book loved for it’s fictional depth and quirkiness – but these were the first three that popped into my head.

What are your three books?

This post is part of the Bloggiesta, a weekend challenge where bloggers spend time on pesky blog tasks or work to get ahead on their blogging. This mini challenge is about thinking outside the box for better blog posts. 

One of the biggest challenges for me as a blogger is staying motivated and excited about my blog. One of the ways I combat that is trying to mix up the types of blog posts I write. It’s easy to fall into a rut of constantly posting the same type of posts over and over again, especially for us book bloggers who write about similar topics all the time.

The purpose of this mini challenge is to brainstorm new ways to write about our favorite topic — books! — to keep blogging fresh and exciting.

Step 1: Review the (Many) Types of Blog Posts

I found several great resources that give suggestions on types of blog posts to write. You probably don’t have to read all of these today, but bookmark the ones you find helpful.

• 48 Ideas for Types of Posts You Can Publish
• 26 Types of Blog Posts
• 20 Types of Blog Posts
• The 5 Types of Blog Posts that Experts Write
• All 13 Types of Blog Posts

Step 2: Brainstorm

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to brainstorm ideas for as many of the following types of blog posts as you can. If a post type sounds uninteresting, skip it. If it sounds too technically challenging, think of an idea anyway.

1. A Link Post – share link (or series of links) your readers might find interesting
2. A Short Post – less than 200 words
3. A List Post – simple as it sounds, a list of some sort
4. An Opinion Post – take an event, news, or another blog post and share your opinion on it
5. A Poll or Question Post – post a poll or ask your readers a specific question for feedback
6. A How-To Post – you’re an expert in something; big or small, share how to do it
7. A Long Post – more than 700 words
8. A Review Post – self-explanatory, I think 
9. A Definition Post – show your expertise about a topic related to your blog
10. A Personal Post – something that’s going on in your life, related to your normal blog topic or not
11. A Resource Post – you know a lot about something, share the sites/books/tutorials you go to on that topic. This is similar to a link post, except these links should be related in some way and be useful for other people who want to know about the topic.
12. A Quote and Commentary Post — share a quote you love, or a quote from Twitter, and add some commentary
13. An Infographic Post — make a chart or infographic (here is a resource for that)
14. A Storify Post — use Storify to gather posts on a particular topic
15. A Frequently Asked Questions Post — answer some common questions on a topic or solicit questions then answer them
16. A Video Post — shoot a video of yourself, put it on YouTube, and embed it into a post
17. A Comparison Post — take two (or more) things and compare them for readers
18. An Interview Post — think outside the box for someone you could interview on a subject
19. An Old Post Update — Find an old post you’re proud of and update it for today
20. A Promotional Post — pick something you love and write a post promoting it (this does not have to be for compensation)

Step 3: Move on for Now

Take that list and put it somewhere safe. Then pull it out when you reach a point where you feel your blogging mojo going away and need some fresh ideas. Or, spend part of the Bloggiesta drafting and scheduling some of your new post ideas.

If you have any questions about the posts or have suggestions to add, please share them in the comments!

Photo Credit: Jessica F. on Flickr via a Creative Commons License

I’ve got kind of an odd pair today, a recent piece of fiction that reads more like poetry and an audio book memoir with a crude sense of humor. But, I do think Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill and Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman have something in common — both books are, on some level, interested in relationships and how people in our lives affect our ambitions and successes. They also both speak to the challenges and rewards of the artistic life, even if they come at those themes from very different starting points.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes — a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions — the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

Dept. of Speculation is a weird and wonderful little book. Told in a series of almost-but-not-quite vignettes, the book explores the trials and celebrations of a long relationship and marriage. The little bits and pieces that author Jenny Offill uses to tell this story seem random but, like a good poem, are perfectly and strategically chosen to tell more than just the words on the page. The arc of Offill’s narrator isn’t totally obvious, but it’s super interesting to read. I devoured this one in just a couple of sittings, but I really want to go back to it again to read more slowly — I’m sure I will catch so much more.

Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman

Growing a perfect moustache, grilling red meat, wooing a woman — who better to deliver this tutelage than the always charming, always manly Nick Offerman, best known as Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson?  Combining his trademark comic voice and very real expertise in woodworking — he runs his own woodshop — Paddle Your Own Canoe features tales from Offerman’s childhood in small-town Minooka, Illinois, to his theater days in Chicago, beginnings as a carpenter/actor and the hilarious and magnificent seduction of his now-wife Megan Mullally.  It also offers hard-bitten battle strategies in the arenas of manliness, love, style, religion, woodworking, and outdoor recreation, among many other savory entrees.

Paddle Your Own Canoe is a really funny book, but man can Nick Offerman swear! I’m not that prudish in my reading, but felt like this book needed a little bit of a warning for the really dirty sense of humor. I know a few of the jokes made me blush. I really loved listening to Offerman read this book, but because the book doesn’t really have a “narrative arc” or plot — it’s more a series of essays or lessons — I tended to let a lot of time pass between listening sessions. If you have a hard time focusing on audio books, this one may work better in print.

Disclosure: I borrowed a copy of Dept. of Speculation from my local library and purchased a copy of Paddle Your Own Canoe through Audible.