I'm sure if I read nothing but non-fiction that I couldn't get through all the books on this list in a year. I'm averaging only 10 or 11 non-fiction titles a year lately (my best year for non-fiction, 1995, I read 27, and yes, I well know I'm procrastinating doing anything more important by figuring this all out, but I'm still on my first cup of coffee), and this year none of the non-fiction I've read has been intra-personal library.
Each one of these titles is a chastisement NOT to go to the bookstore.
- The Life of Thomas More. Peter Ackroyd
- London: The Biography. Peter Ackroyd
- Buddha. Karen Armstrong
- A History of God. Karen Armstrong
- Through the Narrow Gate. Karen Armstrong
- The City of God. Augustine
- Emerson Among the Eccentrics. Carlos Baker
- Room Temperature. Nicholson Baker
- The Size of Thoughts. Nicholson Baker
- Burning Down the House. Charles Baxter
- Witches and Neighbors. Robin Briggs
- A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson
- Imagining Characters. A.S. Byatt & Ignes Sadra
- The Verb 'To Bird.' Peter Cashwell
- Alexander Hamilton. Ron Chernow
- Glass, Paper, Beans. Leah Hager Cohen
- The Voyage of the Beagle. Charles Darwin
- The Merry Heart. Robertson Davies.
- The Consolations of Philosophy. Alain de Botton
- Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared Diamond
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard
- Menagerie Manor. Gerald Durrell
- A Zoo in My Luggage. Gerald Durrell
- American Sphinx. Joseph Ellis
- Jefferson v. Adams. John Ferling
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Richard P. Feynman
- Parrots' Wood. Erma J. Fisk
- The Barbarian Conversion. Richard Fletcher
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
- The Golden Bough. James George Frazer
- Living to Tell the Tale. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Shot in the Heart. Mikal Gilmore
- Will in the World. Stephen Greenblatt
- My Wars Are Laid Away in Books. Alfred Habegger
- The Histories. Herodotus
- Benjamin Franklin. Walter Isaacson
- Night Falls Fast. Kay Redfield Jamison
- The Singular Mark Twain. Fred Kaplan
- Cod. Mark Kurlansky
- Virginia Woolf. Hermione Lee
- Into the Looking-Glass Wood. Alberto Manguel
- The Metaphysical Club. Louis Menand
- Up in the Old Hotel. Joseph Mitchell
- Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Giles Milton
- Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. V.S. Naipaul
- Doctors. Sherwin B. Nuland
- The Circus Fire. Stewart O'Nan
- Down and Out in Paris and London. George Orwell
- A House in Sicily. Daphne Phelps.
- Monsters of God. David Quammen
- The Song of the Dodo. David Quammen
- Passage to Juneau. Jonathan Raban
- An Anthropologist on Mars. Oliver Sacks
- Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey. Lillian Schlissel
- The Noonday Demon. Andrew Soloman
- History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides
- A Distant Mirror. Barbara Tuchman
- The First Salute. Barbara Tuchman
- Lunar Men. Jenny Uglow
- Self-Consciousness. John Updike
- The Life of Elizabeth I. Alison Weir
- The Wars of the Roses. Alison Weir
- In Pharaoh's Army. Tobias Wolff
- A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary. Virginia Woolf
Now that I've momentarily squelched the desire to go to the bookstore I need to come up with a way to get myself all psyched up to clean bird cages, a much more difficult task.
I always go to the used bookstore just to look around but I always seem to see something that needs to be on my bookshelf instead of someone elses.
ReplyDeleteYou have quite the list of nonfiction titles. Many of them are also in my pile of reading. The one I am embarrassed at not having read yet is London by Peter Ackroyd. When it was first published three years ago my husband and I were in London. The book hadn't made it to the States yet so we bought it and lugged it home because we had to have it. I was going to read it right away while our trip was still fresh, how exciting it was going to be. Three years on and neither of us has even cracked the cover. But we plan on going back to London someday so as long as I read before I touch down at Gatwick, then I figure I'm okay :)
The Hermione Lee bio of Virginia Woolf is excellent and helps provide a broader understanding of Woolf's life and work, and is particularly good if you are planning on reading Woolf's diaries.
We picked up our copy three years ago in London as well! And that's pretty much my take on the book--wait until right before we go back, and read it then. I DEFINITELY want to go back.
ReplyDeleteI'm to the chapter on Vita Sackville-West in the Hermione Lee. I stopped there three or four years back intending to read v.'s All Passion Spent before I continued and then getting sidetracked by something else. I need to get back to it.