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Drop all your great nonfiction book recommendations here so other readers can get ideas of what books they'd like to read during Nonfiction November or to add to their ever-expanding TBRs!

**Authors, no self-promotion in this thread, please! Those types of posts or posts containing affiliate links will be removed.**

I love this thread because it makes my bookshelf implode ;)

Here are a couple of mine:
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (rec reading after just mercy because his case is one mentioned in it or vice verse)
Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer

I pretty much exclusively read nonfiction so the challenge is going to be reading 4 books!

I actually have made lists of my favorite nonfiction books (these are affiliate links, I will edit if that's not allowed).

Noteworthy Nonfiction

Twisted True Crime

Liberal Library

I also recently published Twitter Marketing for Microbrands: Tailored Tips for Bloggers, Podcasters, Sellers, Streamers, and More

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
How to Survive a Plague by David France
Educated by Tara Westover
How to be Champion by Sarah Millican
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Why I am No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Undivided by Vicky Beeching
In The Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott
Anything by Jon Ronson
East-West Street by Philippe Sands
A Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich

My Thoughts Be Bloody by Nora Titone
The River of Doubt by Candace Millard
In Trouble Again by Redmond O'Hanlon
The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
Goldwyn by A Scott Berg
The Showman by David Thompson
The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
One Summer by Bill Bryson
Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson

The Man Who Caught the Storm by Brantley Hargrove
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
Eruption: The Untold Story of Mt. St. Helen's by Steve Olson
Boys Keep Swinging by Jake Shears
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby
A World of Three Zeros by Muhammad Yunus
The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women by Susan J. Douglas & Meredith W. Michaels
...and so many more!

Hi Everyone!

Here are my recommendations! I need to comb through some of yours to figure out what I’m reading next month! 🙇‍♀��

DESIGN
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
- Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War by Hal Vaughan

SPORT
- Velocity by Ajaz Ahmed & Stephen Olander
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larsen

TRUE
- A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
- The Suspicions if Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale


VOICE
- Without You, There is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite by Suki Kim
- Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside his own Body by Martin Pistorius with Megan Lloyd Davies

Happy reading!

Hope everyone has a great Nonfiction November, here are a couple of suggestions for non-fiction reads this year! (these are very loosely sorted into the 4 prompts and could probably match different prompts if desired)

Design:
Shakespeare's Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects
Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently


Sport:
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism
Soccerwomen: The Icons, Rebels, Stars, and Trailblazers Who Transformed the Beautiful Game


True:
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore
The Arsonist
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Shakespeare Saved My Life


Voice:
The Fire Next Time
Are Prisons Obsolete?
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Something Written in the State of Denmark: An Actor's Year with the Royal Shakespeare Company

Voice ,Just Kids

The YouTube channel "My Reading Life" has a ton of good nonfiction recommendations.

I realized in the last couple of days that I haven't read nearly as much Nonfiction as I thought, but I do have at least one recommendation for each of the prompts:

�� design: Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum by Martin Bailey
�� sport: Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar
�� true: I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
�� voice: Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

chan wrote: "I realized in the last couple of days that I haven't read nearly as much Nonfiction as I thought, but I do have at least one recommendation for each of the prompts:
[bookcover:Starry Night: Van Gog..."

I have been wanting to read some of these but never got around to it.

I didn't break these up into the prompts, but here are some books that I've read in the past year or so that I have really enjoyed:

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl - Carrie Brownstein
The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers - Maxwell King
Becoming - Michelle Obama
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom - Yeonmi Park
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women - Kate Moore
Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records - Amanda Petrusich
The Complete Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with DeathThe Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

I just finished The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London by Christopher Skaife. So good! I just finished the audiobook which is read by the author, clearly a natural storyteller. Highly recommend!!

-Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots
-Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur
-Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
-The Best We Could Do
-What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
-The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

I thoroughly enjoyed This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, highly recommend if anyone is interested in the Sri Lankan war with the Liberation Tamil Tigers(LTTE).
I also loved Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore.
Books i would like to get to are :
- To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
-The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
-The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

Earlier this year I read Symphony for the City of the Dead. Highly recommend for anyone who is interested in reading about the Seige of Leningrad and Shostakovich.

other recommendations:
The Deeds of Arms and Chivalry by Christine de Pizan
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan
The Debate of the Romance of the Rose by Christine de Pizan
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey
Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology by Verlyn Flieger
Intended Treason by Paul Durst
The Real Guy Fawkes
God's Secret Agents
God's Smuggler
Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers
The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
The War Diary of Admiral Yi Sun-sin
Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
The Art of War
The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

one more: Empress by Ruby Lal

Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miner's Strike
This fit all the challenges

These are some of my favorite non-fictions and I recommend any of them.

-Industrial-Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, from the Slave Trade to Climate Change
-Mad for God: Bartolome Sanchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete
-Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
-Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
-War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
-The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State
-A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism
-Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police
-Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean
-Indeh: An Apache Odyssey
-The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
-Last Chance to See
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years
-The Triumph of Christianity: How a Small Band of Outcasts Conquered an Empire
-Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
-Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology
-Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle
-Detroit: An American Autopsy
-Geronimo's Story of His Life
-Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
-Rare Adventures & Painful Peregrinations
-Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

Just a few that I've read this year:


The Answer is... by Alex Trebek
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
The New Jim Crow
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Skloot
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Villavicencio
Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Cleopatra by Stacy Schif
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
The Sun Does Shine
The Ravenmaster by Christopher Skaife
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynn Olson
Unfollow by Megan Phelps Roper

I used to think that nonfiction was boring; then one day I realized that when nonfiction is good... it's GOOOOOOD.

Some of my favorites are:

Columbine by Dave Cullen
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Dopesick by Beth Macy
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Inheritance by Dani Shapiro
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

A few people have mentioned Just Kids, which I really liked, but I liked M Train by Patti Smith as well.

-Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
-The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
-Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
'The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
-Bill Bryson books
-Trip by Cheryl Strayed
-Dopesick by Beth Macy

My favorite book of all time (which just so happens to be non-fiction) is The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage by Brené Brown. This book literally changed my life; I read it several times a year. I don't care who you are, everyone needs to read this book and will benefit from it!

Other great non-fiction reads I love are:

- American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
- Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
- American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton
- Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
- Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
- Becoming by Michelle Obama
- The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music by Steve López
- Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump
- Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land by Toni Jensen

My recommendations:

How Not To Die (best nutrition book that saved my life)

Why I Write (has some 20th-century politics mixed in, but the more I think about this book, the more I appreciate the writing advice Orwell gave out. It's not just about writing fiction, I actually think it's the best advice for academic writing and researching in academia)

From Here To Eternity (not really academic, but definitely a fun non-fiction book about various death traditions and festivals around the world. made me make peace with my own mortality)

Hi, I'm interested in reading about Art and Art history because i dont know enough. I'd really appreciate any recommendations.
Thank you so much! :)

The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg

A Brief History of Time

For any British NfN-ers, I saw a book in the library today called A Soldier's History of the SAS by Chris Ryan which looked interesting.

Some nonfiction books i've loved

Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness
How to Be You: Stop Trying to Be Someone Else and Start Living Your Life
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are
A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns
A Quick & Easy Guide to Sex & Disability
Gender Queer
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
Becoming
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Criptiques
Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
All Boys Aren't Blue
Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
Brown Girl Dreaming

So many, sorry🤣

Divya wrote: "Hi, I'm interested in reading about Art and Art history because i dont know enough. I'd really appreciate any recommendations.
Thank you so much! :)"

Hi, I read The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair earlier this year and loved it. It's a short read, the book is broken up into shades of color, and for every shade, there is a story about the color, often historical, but sometimes why a particular color was created or chosen.

@ Ashleigh Thank you so much! This sounds like a book I'd thoroughly enjoy :)

Rebecca wrote: "Earlier this year I read Symphony for the City of the Dead. Highly recommend for anyone who is interested in reading about the Seige of Leningrad and Shostakovich."

Thanks, Rebecca! That has been on my TBR for so long! I needed your additional nudge of encouragement.

I highly recommend So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

@Ashleigh - Just wanted to thank you, I've placed an order for The Secret lives of colour. I'm so excited :D

Diane: your welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

Divya wrote: "@Ashleigh - Just wanted to thank you, I've placed an order for The Secret lives of colour. I'm so excited :D"

That's awesome I hope you enjoy the book!

@Ashleigh: Thank you, I'm sure I will :)
I'm so looking forward to it.

My TBR, although I'm not sure I'll read all of them:

Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age by Sue Armstrong

Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor by Art Bell

Meteorite: The Stones from Outer Space That Made Our World by Tim Gregory

The Queen's True Worth: Unravelling the public & private finances of Queen Elizabeth II by David McClure

The Truth About Exercise: Why We Never Evolved to Exercise and What to Do About It by Daniel E. Lieberman

Craigslist Confessional: A Collection of Secrets from Anonymous Strangers by Helena Dea Bala

A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
by Judith Flanders

Beneath the Night: How the stars have shaped the history of humankind by Stuart Clark

The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens �� and Ourselves by Arik Kershenbaum

Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey J. Selingo

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

Zonal Marking: How the Dutch Backpass, the Italian Defense, and Portuguese Tricky Wingers Made Modern Soccer by Michael Cox

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Postrel, Virginia

A couple I've read over the past several years that I highly recommend:

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution - The story of the development of the CRISPR gene-editing tool. I am the farthest thing from a scientist & I loved this book. The author just won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live - The author suffers from severe depression & this is the story of her going through an experimental treatment where she was put into a coma that simulated being dead. Totally fascinating.

Hello All, I have a question. I’m not sure which thread to post it on. Are there going to be prompts or themes this year for anyone that likes to pick their reads using them? I love the prompts. I always read 4 nonfiction books but use the prompts to focus my reading. Thank You.

Sherri wrote: "Hello All, I have a question. I’m not sure which thread to post it on. Are there going to be prompts or themes this year for anyone that likes to pick their reads using them? I love the prompts. I ..."

The Prompts for 2020 are:
Time
Movement
Buzz
Discovery

I'm just getting into non-fiction, but here are a few great ones I've come across so far.

The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London by Christopher Skaife

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day by Kath Kelly

Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls by Lauren Graham

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant : Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Hi.

I am new to this group. I just joined yesterday but I prefer reading nonfiction to fiction.

According to the prompts for 2020 I have chosen the following 4 books to read in November.

prompt - my interpretation of the prompt - title - author

Time - History - Princes at War - Deborah Cadbury
Movement - Travel/Maps - Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall
Buzz - Trending or Popular - Author Unknown - On the trail of Anonymous - Don Foster - aka Tales of a literary detective
Discovery - Science - The Invention of Science - David Wootten

I hope my interpretations are OK.
Thanks

A few of my favorites:

The Girl With Seven Names - Hyeonseo Lee

Lab Girl - Hope Jahren

In Order To Live - Yeonmi Park

Will my Cat Eat My Eyeballs - Caitlin Doughty

Any of Caitlin Doughty’s books!

I'm reading:

This Land is Their Land by David J. Silverman
Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
L-Appart by David Leibovitz

I'm also halfway through Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown from the previous month.

The UK's Prime Minister made an announcement yesterday, with just 24 hours notice, that the country would be going into another lockdown; and thus libraries would be shutting.

I have decided that I want to be less reliant on internet companies for my books and had made the decision to get all of my NfN books from the library. So, I made a mad dash on my lunch break to stock up on books. Thankfully the lockdown isn't going to be until Thursday but I am glad I have got all of my books. However I might have to stretch the categories a bit to make my selections fit.

The books I have chose are:

- Argo: How the CIA & Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio J. Méndez

- The History of the SAS: As told by the men on the ground by Chris Ryan

- Me by Elton John

- Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Those will keep me busy through November.