Nonfiction November

Slate Magazine: "The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years" 
by Dan Kois and Laura Miller (link).

November weather is usually depressing, following the bright blue skies of October. The brightly colored leaves fall, then the dull brown ones. Snow happens -- this year earlier, colder, heavier than usual. This year the news is full of political malfeasance, sadness, violence, and pessimism. My reaction is to want to read more fiction, not to read books that may ultimately be uplifting but that are full of sad details.

Consequence: I'm not participating in any of the blog happenings or other online stuff for Nonfiction November, which is a kind of online event cooked up by who knows what web intelligence!

Today, Slate magazine came to my rescue, giving me lots of food for thought about nonfiction in this very nice list of 50 nonfiction books with a thoughtful summary of each one. I've read -- or at least tried to read -- a few of them, including :

• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (it was too depressing so I didn't finish it).
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (read with a book club that I used to belong to).
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert -- so good I have read it twice.

The list includes many more books that I have been meaning to read, as well as many that don't interest me very much. I find it interesting that there are virtually no food books on the list, and I hope there will be a parallel list of good food books somewhere -- and not just memoirs which seemed to be excluded from this list. This is my contribution to Nonfiction November. I'm writing this for my blog maefood dot blogspot dot com -- I hope you are reading it at my blog and not at a pirated site! This post © 2019 by mae sander.