True Tales and Timely Reads This November
- Deb Caton
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
November contains many reasons to smile. For me, it contains three family birthdays, which is always a joy. Of course, there is Thanksgiving, which is not my favorite holiday, but is nonetheless an opportunity for togetherness and warmth. We also celebrate Veteran’s Day, turn the clocks back for daylight savings, and enjoy the last days of fall. This month also happens to be Nonfiction November, which is a time to read and celebrate nonfiction books.
Many people join readathons or make it a point to pick up one of the nonfiction titles on their TBR list. Some readers may be looking for nonfiction recommendations, especially if they tend to be fiction readers. So where to start if you want to add some nonfiction to your reading repertoire?
A great place is, of course, Wickson, which has shelves of interesting nonfiction titles right out front by the circulation desk. When I visited the library recently, I found titles about Autism and Alzheimer’s, health, as well as memoirs, biographies, and several cookbooks, among others. You can also find lists of nonfiction titles online and on social media to guide you to topics you might already be interested in, including new and classic titles.
Nonfiction is admittedly not my predominant genre, but I do read a few each year. This year I read two nonfiction titles that I think are truly worth sharing.
The first is Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. If you aren’t familiar with John Green, he is known for writing mainly Young Adult fiction books, many of which have been made into movies such as The Fault in Our Stars. Everything is Tuberculosis, however, started in 2019 when Green “met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.” The book weaves the story of Henry in-between startling and quite fascinating information about tuberculosis. Green shares the history of this terrible disease in both scientific and social terms, as well as the devastation it still brings to people around the world today. Green’s writing style is anything but dry, and I learned so much about TB and how the ultimate cure for it lies far outside the lab.
More recently I read The Anxious Generation by Johnathan Haidt for the Brews & Books book club. Haidt is an American social psychologist who has written many books on related topics. The Anxious Generation reads very differently than Green’s book; some folks in book club called it “dry” or “academic.” While the tone is definitely more academic, the topic is something we can likely all relate to – the decline of adolescent mental health beginning in the early 2010’s as a result of what Haidt calls the “phone-based childhood” that replaced the “play-based childhood” that previous generations experienced. He provides data, graphs, real-life stories, case studies and, in the final section, calls to action
to restore the mental and emotional health of everyone, especially young people, in a society that seems at times to be lost to technology.
