Do you love November? Do you love nonfiction? Then consider joining Julie (JulzReads), Sarah (Sarah’s Book Shelves), Katie (Doing Dewey), Rennie (What’s Nonfiction) and I for the fifth annual Nonfiction November, a month-long celebration of everything nonfiction.

Nonfiction November 2018 will run pretty much the same way it has every year. On Monday, the week’s host will put up a post with our prompt for the week where you can link up your posts throughout the week. Throughout the week, everyone can visit the linked posts to check in and comment on other posts. Here are the dates, hosts, and topics for this year:

Week 1: (Oct. 29 to Nov. 2) – Your Year in Nonfiction (Kim @ Sophisticated Dorkiness): Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

Week 2: (Nov. 5 to 9) – Fiction / Nonfiction Book Pairing (Sarah’s Book Shelves): This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.

Week 3: (Nov. 12 to 16) – Be The Expert/Ask the Expert/Become the Expert (Julie @ JulzReads): Three ways to join in this week! You can either share three or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).

Week 4: (Nov. 19 to 23) – Reads Like Fiction (Rennie @ What’s Nonfiction): Nonfiction books often get praised for how they stack up to fiction. Does it matter to you whether nonfiction reads like a novel? If it does, what gives it that fiction-like feeling? Does it depend on the topic, the writing, the use of certain literary elements and techniques? What are your favorite nonfiction recommendations that read like fiction? And if your nonfiction picks could never be mistaken for novels, what do you love about the differences?

Week 5: (Nov. 26 to 30) – New to My TBR (Katie @ Doing Dewey): It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book!

Instagram Challenge

This year we’ll also be bringing back an Instagram photo challenge for Nonfiction November, co-hosted by myself (@kimthedork) and Leann (@Shelf_Aware_). We’re still working out the prompts, and will announce them on Instagram closer to the kickoff. 

If you’re interested in participating in Nonfiction November but don’t have a blog (or are not blogging regularly), feel free to join us on the social media platform of your choice using the hashtag #NonficNov. I hope you’ll consider joining us!

I devoted all of my reading time and energy over the last week to a single book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser. This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was my September book club selection, which propelled me through a book where the length might have otherwise been intimidating. I hate that I’m a reader who gets scared off by long books, but a biography with 515 pages of story and an additional 100 pages of footnotes is such a hurdle for me!

A quick aside about my awesome book club. Every year, we read the New York Times’ top 10 books of the previous year. I love this focus because we never have to vote about what books to read next, I’m challenged to read books might seem too hard otherwise, and the list usually has an interesting variety of titles. The only book club meeting this year I could have attended but skipped because I didn’t read the book was Grant by Ron Chernow…. even book club wasn’t enough to get me through that one.

Anyway, back to Laura Ingalls Wilder! Prairie Fires is a comprehensive biography of a beloved children’s author who lived a life much more fraught and complicated that the fictionalized version she shared in her Little House on the Prairie series.

The book draws on an array of unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and public records to piece together her story and, along the way, a story about pioneers, the American West, and our complicated ideas about the American Dream. It’s a truly stunning, warm, critical, and thoughtful book that I am so glad I made the time to read.

I read all of the Little House books as a kid, but didn’t really know about their publishing history, Wilder’s collaboration and complicated relationship with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, or the ways in which fact and fiction blended together in the stories. It was so interesting, for me, to go back to a childhood favorite and look at it with fresh eyes. The book does an excellent job of focusing first on the true stories of Wilder’s childhood, then shifting to the publishing story of the books and how those stories simplified and smoothed out some devastating personal history.

Fraser is very critical of Lane, Wilder’s daughter, for both her personal behavior and the irresponsible financial choices she made. The late chapters of the book also become a sort of mini-biography of Lane, since her collaboration with her mother on the Little House books greatly impacted the final product. I’m curious to learn more about her, too, after reading this book.

There’s a lot of history in the book that can offer lessons about where we are today — our treatment of the environment, the idea of American exceptionalism, the trend towards isolationism and a hardening of American values — that I haven’t yet had the chance to think more about. Even without that added depth, Prairie Fires is a great book that I think anyone with an affection for the Little House series will enjoy.

It also piqued my interest for a couple of books I’ve been meaning to pick up and read for awhile now:

My Ántonia by Willa Cather –– Cather was writing about pioneers on the prairie at about the same time as Wilder was, and so is mentioned in Prairie Fires as a comparison to those books. This is the only one of Cather’s books on my shelf right now, and even though it’s looked back upon as the third book on a casual trilogy I think it’s a good place to start.

The Finnish Way: Finding Courage, Wellness, and Happiness Through the Power of Sisu by Katja Pantzar — I bought this book up last month because I’m Finnish, but I think it will have something to add to my current reading too. Sisu is the idea of “stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness,” all qualities that come through strongly in Wilder’s fiction and are explored in this biography.

Diving into Prairie Fires was an interesting way to spend a week, but I really glad to have given the time to such a well-research and well- written story. Prairie Fires is a great book that I think anyone with an affection for the Little House series will enjoy.

In every aspect of my life, I’m trying to adopt a new mindset — keep it simple, stupid. Hence, the very obvious title for this blog post!

Because of my work with Book Riot, I feel like I’m pretty well read in the world of new nonfiction. My fiction reading, on the other hand, tends to be a little further behind the times. I read new fiction by authors I love and buzzy titles I can get through the library, but for the most part I think my fiction tends towards books that are popular but slightly older. Here are four books I read this year that are a little older, relatively buzzy, and generally excellent.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

Of course I’m starting this post out with one of the big books that opened 2018 — way to abandon the premise of the post almost immediately! Moving on… the premise of The Immortalists is both dark and intriguing. In 1969, four siblings visit a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they’ll die. Finding out their death date — real or imagined, it’s not clear — affects each of the Gold children differently and dictates the course of the rest of their lives.

I thought this book was absolutely stunning. The writing is beautiful, the characters are sympathetic and real, and the premise plays out in some really surprising, touching ways. I was deeply moved by this story in a way that I didn’t understand until I’d finished, and I think it’s one I’ll be rereading in the future.

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

In this book, Lyndsay Faye gives new life to the story of Jane Eyre by imagining that Jane is actually a serial killer who murders men who abuse women. Jane Steele isn’t quite as gruesome as it sounds, though. There were fewer murders than I expected, and Jane’s romance with her gruff employer plays better than it does in the original. My one complaint is that there was a lesbian subplot of the novel that (disappointingly) didn’t go in the direction I expected, but overall this book was a lot of fun.

In the Woods by Tana French

Everyone I know who loves mysteries raves about Tana French, but I didn’t get around to reading the first book in her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods, until earlier this summer. And it was so great! The plot — the investigation of a young girl’s murder and it’s possible connection to a cold case involving one of the investigating detectives — is interesting enough, but this is a book that’s really more about the characters in the squad. The whole book has this sense of ominousness to it that I really dug too. I’m glad I have more of these books to read!

An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

My favorite fantasy novels are those that take place in a familiar world that also just happens to have magic as part of it, which is almost exactly what An Unkindness of Magicians is about. In New York City, magic controls everything, but it’s also controlled by a strict set of magical families and rules. When a powerful new magician, Sydney, arrives, she upends the social order during a time when power throughout magician society is already being reshuffled. This is a standalone fantasy book, but the way the story ended feels ripe for a sequel or series. There’s no gaping plot holes left open, but the characters Kat Howard introduced were so interesting and rich, I just want to see where their lives take them next. I loved it.

I spent part of this weekend sitting on our patio, underneath a blanket but bathed in sunlight, feeling really grateful that fall is almost here. I love the summer, so much, but there’s something restorative about a change in season that feel particularly welcome right now.

August was a lot of things for me, including a relatively slow reading month. I finished five books in print and two on audio, which really isn’t bad at all, but it felt like I started a ton of books and managed to finish very few of them. Here’s the list:

1. The Dinner List by Rebecca Searle (fiction)
2. The Poisoned City by Anna Clark (nonfiction)
3. Yes We (Still) Can by Dan Pfeiffer (memoir)
4. The Glass Magician by Charlie Holmberg (fiction)
5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (YA fiction/audiobook)
6. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han (YA fiction/audiobook)
7. The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss (nonfiction)

I loved all three of the nonfiction books I finished. The Poisoned City, an in-depth look at the Flint water crisis, was full of excellent reporting and in-depth storytelling. I appreciated how Clark was able to tie the current mess to historical trends in a way that was clear and convincing. Yes We (Still) Can, an Obama administration memoir, was a book that basically just kept me nodding the whole time I read it. And The Woman’s Hour, an account of the fight to finally ratify the 19th Amendment in Tennessee, was a thrilling, infuriating, and inspiring read. Yay, nonfiction!

My fiction reading was a bit more hit and miss in August. I liked, but didn’t love, The Dinner List, a book about what happens when a woman gets to sit down with five people — alive and dead — for dinner on her 30th birthday. The Glass Magician was a nice second book in a fantasy trilogy, although the main character’s hubris in taking on people more powerful than she is had me rolling my eyes a bit. My audiobook revisit to the Harry Potter series is totally delightful, thanks to Jim Dale’s stellar narration. And while I was charmed by Netflix’s adaptation of To All the Boy’s I’ve Loved Before, the audiobook just didn’t land for me.

A Look to September

This post is coming late (and my reading is off to a slow start again) because I was out of town at a marketing conference all of last week. I brought several books with me, but between sessions and activities and time at my hotel knitting (#introvert), I didn’t read much of anything except on the plane rides to and from Cleveland (Heather Won Tesoriero’s delightful look at high school science prodigies, The Class).

I also feel pretty scattered when I even start to think about my reading plans for September. I still have a bunch of galleys I listed out last month that I haven’t finished, I need to get focused on my Read Harder Challenge books again, I’ve been buying new books like there’s no tomorrow, and my library checkouts are reaching absurd levels. I’m so scattered.

Writing all of that out makes me think that September might be a month for clearing the decks — return all the library books, suspend my holds, get all of the books sitting in piles on my desk and my nightstand put back on shelves, and then let my brain just settle down. September is a month of fresh starts and new beginnings, and after August I could absolutely use both.

Happy Monday, reading friends! What books are you excited about this month?