I'm really in the mood for a good nonfiction book. Quite a while ago I started reading Margaret Forster's Daphne Du Maurier biography. I'm not making very good progress, but don't take that as a reflection on the book, as it's quite good. The problem is, it's out of print, so I bought a heavy cloth edition (the easiest and cheapest version I could find at the time). It's not very practical to schlep it around when I have something the size of Kristin Lavransdatter going--not to mention other heavy-ish sorts of books (meaning heavy to carry). Also I am just in the mood for something--different. Not a biography. But something interesting. Something to keep me turning pages. (And a paperback!).
Not knowing exactly what I am in the mood for, I have pulled off my shelves some possibilities, and will have to give them the "first line test" (or maybe first lines, as sometimes it takes a few to hook the reader). Which one sounds the most intriguing? Has anyone read any of these?
The Lives of the Muses by Francine Prose.
"In the Spring of 1932, at the age of eighty, Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves sailed into New York Harbor to collect an honorary Ph.D.from Columbia University for having inspired, for having been, Alice in Wonderland.
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly.
"This book began as an inquiry into the future and ended as an investigation of the past."
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
"There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings."
The Outermost House: A Year in the Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston.
"Majestic and mutilated, the great glacial scarp of Cape Cod's outer beach rises from the open Atlantic, separating it from Cape Cod Bay."
A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the Eighteenth Century by Andrea de Robilant.
"Some years ago, my father came home with a carton of old letters that time and humidity had compacted into wads of barely legible paper. He announced that he had found them in the attic of the old family palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he had lived as a boy in the twenties."
French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan.
"Let's get her to say it." My sister was ambitious for me.
"She's only three." My brother was a skeptic.
"Come on, I think she can do it. Come on!"
"All right, all right, let's see if she can do it."
"OK, repeat after us: 'Everything I like is.'"
"EverythingIlike is."
And on it went, ending with three big words: "illegal," immoral," and "fattening."
It's rare that I am at a loss for what to read. So many nonfiction titles sound good, but I'm not sure what I will stick with (I am notoriously bad about starting a NF book and not finishing it--at least in a timely manner). Fiction books line up in a nice, orderly manner in my mind. Nonfiction is just all over the place. If I can have more than one novel on the go at once, why not the occasional extra NF as well? Now, something that is really good....