I’ve been interested in food and reading about food for the last several months. While I’m not a farmer or a gardener myself, I do love the local farmers’ market and how much great, fresh, local produce I can get when it’s not freezing here in the Midwest.
But there are people who do a lot more than just go to the farmers’ market each Saturday — they go all out to change their lives and their food. This Narrative Nonfiction 5 lists is about memoirs and nonfiction written by people who have taken back their food by going back to the farm.
Book List
Since March is Women’s History Month, I decided to do my second Narrative Nonfiction 5 list on female writers that use this form. When the New Journalism of the 1960s stared, there weren’t many women writing as part of the moment but in the years since it’s opened up and you can find women writing really amazing narrative nonfiction on a host of subjects.
I gathered this list from scouring the index of True Stories by Norman Sims. I haven’t read books by all of the authors, but (predictably) researching for this list has made me really want to try them!
The inaugural edition of Narrative Nonfiction 5 features five books by authors that went in-depth covering “current” events in the United States. I put current in quotes because most of these books are more than 10 years old, which makes current a bit of a stretch. Still, I’m fairly confident many of these issues haven’t changed so much that the lessons of the story aren’t relevant today.
One goal I set for myself this year is to do more with nonfiction on my blog. One way I’ve decided to do that is through a new semi-weekly feature: Narrative Nonfiction 5. Every few weeks or so, Narrative Nonfiction 5 will feature a list of five nonfiction books on a particular theme.
As the title suggests, I’m focusing specifically on narrative nonfiction. That term can encompass a lot of things, but for me it means nonfiction books that use techniques of fiction — plot, characters, dialogue, symbolism — to tell a good, true, story.
I rarely get books in the mail because I don’t usually do ARCs and don’t often enter in giveaways online. I don’t do ARCs because I like to read what I feel like reading without feeling obligated to get to a book specifically because I agreed to review it. I’m not sure why I don’t [...]
