Hey and welcome back to BookBreak! My name is Nicola from the channel Robotnic and I'm
here today to talk to you a little bit about non-fiction.
I know that non-fiction can seem kind of daunting especially if it's something that you've only
really read at school and it's something that I talk about a lot on my YouTube channel.
Here on BookTube in general we also celebrate Non-Fiction November every autumn.
So today I want to give you some tips on how to find books that you might enjoy in the
Non-Fiction section and also some recommendations from myself. My first tip is to start by thinking
about what subjects and topics really interest you.
Maybe you are really into outer-space and you're curious about what a space mission
might look like, or maybe you are really into crafts and you want to read about the history
of the needle point or something like that. I find it always helps to start with a human
element. So, maybe if it were space, look at astronauts or for needle craft I would
look for some of the best fashion designers of our time or something like that. So those
are some interesting ways to think about what you are into and where you might start to
look for them.
Another great way to find your first or next non-fiction read is to look at authors that
you already enjoy. Maybe there are authors of novels or of short story collections that
you've enjoyed who might also write non-fiction. I know off the top of my head Haruki Murakami
has written a memoir about his relationship to writing and how that pertains to his relationship
with running. He's also written a piece about the subway tax in Tokyo which took place in
the mid 90s.
Hilary Mantel has written non-fiction. A lot of authors have written memoirs and things
like that so maybe think about which authors you really enjoy that you want to hear more
from and just have a look through their bibliographies and see if they have any non-fiction in there.
In general I think that biographies are a good place to start if you think about people
who you enjoy watching on TV, in films, in popular culture or anything like that. One
great memoir that I read not too long ago was Yes Please by Amy Poehler. She's known
for a lot of her comedic roles in different films and probably best known for her part
in Parks and Recreation - Leslie Knope - and she talks about that role and she talks about
her journey going into the comedy industry in her memoir. She also talks about the different
trials and tribulations of motherhood and of the industry itself and just different
things that she dealt with when growing up. It's quite a feminist book as well and I really
enjoyed that one.
That's a good place to start; someone that you are familiar with, who you already know
that you love. Go check out their voice and see what you think of it. Another great place
to start is to just look for books that are written by people with interesting lives.
Someone who I've always been quite interested in since I've seen her around in kind of Scottish
literature circles is Jackie Kay. She's currently the Scots Makar (which is kinda like our poet
laureate) and she wrote a memoir called Red Dust Road.
It's about her growing up in Scotland, she's mixed-race and grew up with a white mother
who I think died quite young and she then went out into the world looking for her father
and this book is an exploration of what she went through and what she'd heard and how
she put all the pieces together to eventually meet her dad. It's just a really heartwarming
story, it's something a little bit different and it's actually coming out with a new cover
from Pan Macmillan and I would definitely recommend it.
Another great place to go is the popular science section; whether you like science - as in
scientific discovery - or if you like things like psychology, social sciences, or other
kind of areas of life if you're curious of how things work then it's a great place to
start.
One of my favourites is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Oliver
Sacks was a neurologist and he's written several books about his different patients and the
different things that he encountered in his professional life. In The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat is a title story of one such anecdote about a man who cannot recognize
people's faces, so he talks about different psychological things that happen to people.
Like people who wake up thinking that their left leg doesn't belong to them; all kinds
of strange and wonderful things happen in this book and some of them really creep me
out, some of them are really heartbreaking and others were really quite funny. This is
a great place to start if you're interested in psychology and how the mind works, and
just for a real dose of humanity.
Moving on to my favourite genre of Non-Fiction, I'm going to talk to you a little about essays
and criticism. Essays and criticism is quite a big topic. It could mean someone writing
film reviews, directly in response to the films that they've watched. It could be about
music. On the whole, a lot of cultural critics talk about themselves as much as they talk
about their subjects. Think of A. A. Gill who covered all kinds of topics around travel
and politics but also his favourite thing was, I think, restaurants - he was a well
known restaurant critic. So I think a great place to start is, on a similar vein, Clive
James.
Clive James has a book called Cultural Amnesia which is an absolute doorstop of a book. It
has all kinds of essays from different topics that he's written about. It would be a good
place to dip in and sample lots of different things across all different topics and culture.
He also put himself into his stories.
If you're looking for something a bit more familiar, I'm also a big fan of Shrill by
Lindy West. This book is kind of a cultural memoir; it deals with a lot of topics that
she got embroiled in online. I was first familiar with her when I was studying from criticism
and she was mentioned a lot, because she wrote for The Stranger Magazine. She wrote hilarious
and fun reviews. Later, she went on to do things like criticize the jokes about rape
in comedy and she got a whole load of backlash for that, she writes about that in this book,
and she kind of parlays it into a bit more of a memoir as well, so that may be another
place that you'd want to start.
And I couldn't leave here without recommending one of my absolute favourite authors, who
is Maggie Nelson, she had a book called The Red Parts which is about how her aunt was
murdered long before Maggie Nelson's birth. The case was reopened when Maggie Nelson was
an adult and she wrote this book about the experience of going to trial and trying to
deal with the grief but also with the ideas of violence against women that led directly
to her next book, which is called The Art of Cruelty, which is criticism about art and
violent subjects and that led to her most recent book - The Argonauts, which is a memoir
and cultural criticism kind of book. It's hard to describe but it's about sexuality,
it's about family, about modern motherhood and those types of topics so if you can't
tell, I really enjoy stuff that kind of grabs from all different parts of our culture and
our personal experiences. I think that essays and cultural criticism are great places to
start.
I hope that's given you some ideas to get you started. If you have any recommendations
for non-fiction books that you've loved, that you think other BookBreak watchers will enjoy,
leave it in the comments below. Don't forget to check out Non-Fiction November which will
have all kinds of tips as well. We'll see you next time - happy reading.