December talking meme: Non-Fiction

[ariadnes_string]

Destina asked me for my seven favorite non-fiction books, which was a great question, though it turned out to be hard narrowing it down! I’m sure not sure these are my seven absolute favorites-I’ll probably remember something the minute I post this-but these are the seven(non-work) books I remember loving right now (many of them pretty recent

Comments

[destina]

Ooooh, this is AWESOME. Thank you so much for taking the time to list these out! I'm going to go look them all up - the closest I come to having any of them is that I've picked up Gawande's Being Mortal.

Your obsessions and mine don't really overlap, per se, but I do love history, and thus I do read a fair amount of war tomes - tho usually nothing after WW II, because recent history is not as compelling to me (not enough time for proper perspective, yet).

[ariadnes_string]

Being Mortal is absolutely worth reading, though it's a pretty steep curve getting into it--I, anyway had to overcome a lot of "but I don't want to hear about that." But he ends up including so many accounts of meaningfulness (if that's a word) in end-of-life experiences, that it's an oddly consoling book. Instructive, too, about how to talk about difficult issues.

I was thinking as I wrote the list that our obsessions don't really overlap--sorry--but thanks for giving me the opportunity to think about these books. (my own research interests are pre-nineteenth-century--maybe because of that, I tend to read about things after 1850 for pleasure.)

[alba17]

Thanks for sharing these. I'm reading a Max Hastings book about WW 1 right now.

[ariadnes_string]

Hastings is a good writer, isn't he? I just saw my library has the audiobook of the WWI book and was thinking of listening. How is it?

[apgeeksout]

I read The Good Soldiers earlier this year, based, I think, on your post about it. Sad is right; I haven't had Thank You for Your Service in me yet.

Both the Millard books sound great!

[ariadnes_string]

Thank You For Your Service is, if anything, even sadder--and a real indictment of mental health care in this country, generally. But Finkel still writes with so much compassion that it's worth reading, if hard going.

The Millard books are SOOO good. I love books about the Amazon, so I assumed I'd like that one. But I had no preexisting interest in James Garfield, and I was still engrossed.