So Much Fantastic Non-Fiction!

Doesn't Dorothy Emily Stevenson look like a nice person?

I am not a person who likes to impress others with her challenging reading choices.  My most favorite books are by D.E. Stevenson.

I think reading should be fun.  If I happen to learn something along the way, well, that’s a nice bonus.  But it’s certainly not essential to my reading enjoyment. Does Mira Sorvino really expect me to believe her favorite book is Stephen Hawking‘s A Brief History of Time?  Um, okay.  And Gwyneth Paltrow curls up with Crime and Punishment? Really now.  Nobody ever cops to a Danielle Steele or a John Grisham, so how on earth do these amazingly prolific writers sell all those books?  I guess it’s all of us poor slobs who aren’t feeling the Dostoyevsky this week.  Okay, well, whatever.  I’m getting off track.

This summer I’ve gotten involved with a few non-fiction books.  I’m only going to give you a very brief gist of these works–you can look them up on Amazon.  But I have really enjoyed all these books, and they are well worth reading.  They would be good for a book group, too.

First up:  Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.  Autobiographical account of the English Fuller’s childhood in Africa.  And there is the second one, mostly about Fuller’s mother (which is really a sequel because there are a fair amount of references back to the  first one), called Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.  A lot of tragedy in the Fuller family, but a lot of humor, too.  (The mother waves her arms around and cries, “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is experiencing a drought,” with increasing urgency, whenever she needs a new cocktail.  I am considering taking up this little habit.)

Next, we come to In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson.  I was reading this and marveled to my children that here I was, reading about Woodrow Wilson and isolationism, and I was enjoying it!  Larson is some sort of magician in this way.  This is the story of the American ambassador, William Dodd, who was appointed to Germany in 1933, just as Hitler’s power was really being felt.  So of course the historical period is a fascinating one, but Larson makes it all so compelling, even things like Wilson and isolationism, or the political procedure by which Dodd was appointed to his post.  This is the story of an American family living in a most extraordinary time. It helps that a lot of the story revolves around the ambassador’s daughter.  I always like to hear about things from a woman’s point of view.

Fourth is The Psychopath Test  by Jon Ronson.  Starts off with a strange puzzle that Ronson is asked to help solve, the purpose of which I found to be a bit confusing.  But stick with it just a few more pages and things get going.  It’s incredibly interesting stuff. Ronson interviews various individuals that display the degrees of psychopathy. He chronicles his experiences quite wittily, but does not minimize the terror these individuals are capable of stirring in others.  There really is an actual psychopath test, with about 24 personality traits characteristic of psychopaths.  You read this list and, first of all, worry that you yourself are one.  But the mere fact that you are worried that you are means you aren’t.  As you read, however, and ponder individuals you have known, and may still know, you begin to see that perhaps there are more psychopaths floating around than you’d care to admit–think CEOs and politicians.  And that guy you dated.

So I guess it’s only four non-fictions I’m passing on to you.  Seemed like more, probably because I’ve been reading more non-fiction than fiction lately.  But really, these are all as entertaining as fiction, and educational to boot!  Maybe I’ll give A Brief History of Time the old college try next summer (yeah, right).