What Non-Fiction Are We Reading Now (Jan. thru Mar. 2025)?

Q1 thread for non-fiction groupies.

I've just started I'm Glad My Mom Died which should carry me through New Year's Eve. It's a short book that reads very quickly though.

Description of Sacred Spaces (-- on mountains, in caves, near springs, around singulair old trees or ruins --) in the Syrian Periphery, in the third Chapter of a book by Gebhard Fartacek: Pilgerstätten in der syrischen Peripherie : eine ethnologische Studie zur kognitiven Konstruktion sakraler Plätze und deren Praxisrelevanz

I'm starting the year with Van Gogh's Ear: The True Story by Bernadette Murphy

The Open Society and its Enemies : Volume 1 Plato by Karl R. Popper, of oppressive topicality

Adrian Tinniswood's The Power and The Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War but also Anglican Women Novelists, edited by Judith Maltby & Alison Shell.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness
Susannah Cahalan
4/5 stars
This is an older book but it still holds up. It is the true-life story of a doctor that convinces 8 healthy people in the 1970's to enter into a mental hospital and eventually had to prove their sanity to get out of the hospital. Was the study legitimate or did it really happen? Very interesting! Non-Fiction

I've finished my first book of the year, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff, first published in 2017. What Jasanoff has done is provide a biography of Conrad, revealing the important episodes/periods of his life that so strongly informed his writing. Jasanoff weaves these all skillfully with deep dives into four of Conrad's major works: The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. She also explores in depth the historical contexts of these works. Jasanoff is an excellent writer, and her prose flows beautifully throughout this volume. Also, the book profits significantly from Jasanoff's frequent quoting from Conrad's letters, journals and memoirs that provide a greater depth of understanding of Conrad's own experiences, opinions and insights, both good and, from our perspective, frustrating and lamentable.

One important warning: in her descriptions of the four novels mentioned, and of others of Conrad's works, Jasanoff does not shy away from plot spoilers. Other than that, I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Joseph Conrad and the world he lived in and wrote about.

My longer review is posted on my Club Read thread.

I have just finished reading Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America and posted my review. I will be seeking out other work by the author.

Next up for me is The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy, which I checked out of the public library yesterday. While I was there, I snagged a couple of non-fiction books from the Friends of the Library sale area: A History of Reading and The Feminine Dimension of the Divine. I'm sure I'll read both, but I'm not in a rush for either.

Finished listening to Chip War by Chris Miller and then went out a purchased the ebook so I can refer more readily to some of the corporate and technological history contained therein. And to read the notes for bibliographical references: this book will be at hand for a while.

So glad I finally got to this book, as I've heard a lot of folks reference it for months, and now the pieces of technological history I was missing feel more filled in. It's well organized, thoughtful in analysis, and has a very comfortable writing style.

Next up will be some naval history books I've got bookmarks stuck in midpoint - need to finish 'em up. Then Clear the Bridge, about the World War 2 patrols of the USS Tang. I began reading books about naval history with Tuohy's The Bravest Man: The Story of Richard O'Kane & U.S. Submariners in the Pacific War 3 years ago, so I'm very interested to get to this book written by the subject of that first book.

I'm reading The Great Right North: Inside Far-Right Activism in Canada by Stephane Leman-Langlois, Aurelie Campana and Samuel Tanner

I'm finally getting to Empire of Pain which is about the Sackler family and its company, Purdue Pharma, and how they made a fortune pushing oxycontin.

>12 vwinsloe: I really enjoyed that read. The author has done an amazing amount of research and has put it together in a very engaging style. This is 100 percent raw greed on display. Fascinating...and scary.

My husband just presented me with an early birthday gift, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness.

>13 LynnB: Good. I'm reading it on the strength of Say Nothing which was one of my best reads of 2021.

started this eBook via Libby ~

On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service
by Anthony Fauci M.D.

I'm reading Ghost Soldiers, about a rescue of American prisoners in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines towards the end of the WWII. It's really good.

I'm also reading one just for fun, March Hares and Monkeys' Uncles about mostly British idioms and where they come from.

I just started The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries and it's been good so far. A wonderfully bookish book for these cold nights. I am anxious to get the the chapter on Montaigne.

>18 trav: I think I found the book for the RTT Renaissansce theme! what a perfect BB

Safavid Medical Practice by Cyril Elgood. Fascinating the entanglement of science, healthcare and plolitical power.

>17 cmbohn: I love Ghost Soldiers!!! Such a quick read.

I finished Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern. De Quincey was an English memoirist and essayist, active from early- to mid-19th century. He is also the author of the famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I most enjoyed de Quincey's earliest writings, here, in which he describes his childhood in an upper-middle class family, though his remembrances of his friendships with Coleridge and Wordsworth were interesting, too. Included in this volume is de Quincey's rewritten and extremely bloated version of the Confessions. I must admit I went out and found the original, which is about a third of the length and certainly the better option, as even de Quincey himself evidently admitted.

Just started The Emperor Charlemagne because I know basically zilch about him or that period in Europe and this book is part of the Audible Plus catalog so it's part of my subscription. So far so good.

eBook ~

Revenge of the Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell

the invention of clouds for the RTT theme Heavens this month

>24 Molly3028: Gladwell's books are so interesting!

I just finished the David Neiwert tome Age of Insurrection and posted my review. All politics is local, but "local" has become very hard to understand, and this book makes some interesting efforts in that regard.

I've now started in on The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, which explores the former conspicuousness of Jesus' tallywacker in a serious and perceptive way.

>7 JulieLill: Oh wow! What was up with Stanford and these wild psychology experiments in the 70s? Sounds like an interesting read.

>10 PocheFamily: What are your thoughts on the recent Open AI/ Deepseek news and its effects on the AI/ Big Tech market?

The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose
Keith Scott
3/5 stars
This was quite a detailed summary about the cartoon series of Bullwinkle Moose, Rocky the flying squirrel and the other animated series that came from Jay Ward and Bill Scott and there were many more that were involved in the history of those cartoons and more. Very interesting! Books On Film and Entertainment

>29 GFO.Publishing: I think the news was anticipated. Discussions around Open AI have often speculated it would create a more fierce competitive environment by leveling the playing field. Competition accelerates innovation - within reason. Where that line should be placed is a matter of opinion.

The market has a lot of emotion on any topic. We're still in the early days of AI - wait till quantum computing gets closer to being imbedded in products and then we'll see frenzy!
Editing to add: However, it was very thoughtful of the market to lower prices on some things I'd been waiting for.

I've personally been enjoying the articles on comparison of AI tools, say ChatGPT vs. DeepSeek. Asking historical or culturally sensitive questions gets interesting results - the responses by each AI are what you would expect.

In my own usage, and it is VERY limited to "when I've tried all else, can AI give me a hint" research, I've only compared ChatGPT and CoPilot: hands down, CoPilot is better, actually once giving me a clue that was actually useful but neither rates above a C- (and I'm being generous). Both gave so many erroneous and vague answers that only a fool would rely on them: they spent a lot of answers on re-wording text in sites and ended up misquoting their sources in some cases. Once, ChatGPT just gave "Bing.com" as its source (the linkie lead to 10+ pages of hits and after the first 6 pages I gave up trying to find what it was citing). On the other hand, I'm enjoying the improved Google search experience that gives a quick summary of the salient points at the top of each result list. Now if they could only get rid of the "personality" and shoulder shrugs ... I'm not online to interact with teenagers, even artificial ones... I SWEAR it eye-rolled me at one point ...

>31 PocheFamily: I'm enjoying the improved Google search experience that gives a quick summary of the salient points at the top of each result list.

I've already seen a number of clear factual errors in those Google AI summaries. It's wasted screen space as far as I'm concerned.

Alternating between 2 essay collections: Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino, who writes for the New Yorker, and The Hard Crowd, by novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner, who also contributes to the New Yorker. Both seem to me to be heirs of Didion, may she RIP.

Just finished the last of Robert Caro's 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson', now reading Railtown by Ethan Elkind as a bit of a break from big books :)

I'm reading Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging by Candace Savage

Just started on Chris Hayes "The Siren Call".
His thesid is that information is plentiful but attention is scarce; so attention has become valuable, whith whole companies founded on
the intention and ability of grabbing yours for fun (no so much) and profit.

Can't say much about it yet, too early in process, except that Hayes seems to be a very literate author with refs to culture and literature both high and low. "attention pulsed like Golum's ring"... Maybe it was unfair of me to quote that one, her really is much better, but that's a line that stuck in my sorry head. It got my attention.

>36 modalursine: I saw Hayes flogging that book on a podcast recently, and it sounded interesting. Certainly the thesis is credible enough.

He's certainly informative about the specific techniques that cable companies use to "Grab" your attention. Now that I'm clued in, I won't be able to "unsee" the artifice.

Many years ago, I showed somebody what proofreader's call "rivers". When pages are not carefully composed to avoid it, the various white spaces between words on successive lines almost line up to provide a set of top to bottom continuous but slightly meandering white spaces, hence the suggestive name "rivers".
Well, this guy was a bit of an obsessive, but hadn't ever noticed the rivers. Once I showed them to him his reaction was "Rats! Now that I've seen them, I'll never be able to avoid them and I'll have to buy the more expensive editions to get rid of them:"

>38 modalursine: I just went ahead and put a hold on the Hayes book at my public library. I am number 77 in the queue! So maybe later this year.

I just finished The House of the Medici: Its Rise and Fall. Really informative, but gruesome in parts and overall kind of sad. Such a powerful family, and yet such a mess.

I'm reading Hood Feminism for Black History Month.

I've just started Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil

Been working through Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson. It's a very lengthy book on the American Civil War. So far, I've read through the parts where McPherson covers the political, social, economic, and cultural factors that helped build up to the Civil War. Currently, I'm working through the parts that cover the beginning of the Civil War, such as the succession of the southern states and attack on Fort Sumter.
I've found the book to be very informative so far.

>43 Rome753: That one is on my TBR.

I just started Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I've heard great things about this book.

I'm reading Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. It's quite good so far, but, understandably, long, given the subject matter. I'm about 60 pages into 831-page tome, so I'm going to be at it awhile.

Anything by Judt is good stuff. I find that reading "door stoppers" has to be done in short shifts, because they are so information dense.

Has anyone read "Ways to Cultivate a Life of Meaning" by Andy Reven?

>46 modalursine: I might be going the "short shift" route, but the book's due back at the library in a couple of weeks, so I'm powering through this time.

I finished The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray yesterday afternoon, which I'll want to skim in parts before writing my review; I'll give it 4½ stars for now. Next up is New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America's Second Civil Rights Movement by Juan Williams, a follow up to his 1987 book Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, which was adapted into an award winning PBS documentary.

I'm reading A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WW2's Most Dangerous Spy by Sonia Purnell

I'm still working my way through Henry VIII. Started it some months ago. Fascinating book with way more information than just the details of his lusts and wives, especially regarding the how and why of the English Reformation. (Hint: It was about way more than just the king's desire to wed Anne Boleyn.) It is not, however, a fast read.

In honour of Black History Month, I'm reading Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 by Constance Backhouse

an african history of africa as soon as I saw the title, I knew I had to read it, been wanting to read a book like this for a long time.. so far, liking it very much

>53 cindydavid4: It's great, isn't it - I was fortunate enough to read an ARC for a book website I review for.

I'm reading Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies: Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity by Natalie Kononenko

I'm almost to the end of The Small and the Mighty. It's not something that I intended to read; it just showed up in my Little Free Library and once I started looking at it, I couldn't stop. It is written very colloquially, and not in an academic style. Funny in some places, too!

Because it has been mentioned so frequently at the top of LT lists, I read 84, Charing Cross Road for the first time. It was charming, although much shorter than I imagined.

>57 vwinsloe: I love that book!

I was reading The Indifferent Stars Above about the Donner Party but I had to break. I'll get back to it next week.

I'm reading A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby

This book took me a little longer than I expected it to.

I'm reading Jennie's Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood by Wayne Johnston

I'm reading The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum

>62 LynnB: I really liked that one. Just another reminder of why modern technology is a good thing.

I finished The Indifferent Stars Above and now I'm reading Brave Men by Ernie Pyle.

I'm reading Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger. It's one of my Root books that I've put off reading far too long.

I'm reading Notes on a Writer's Life: A Memoir by David Adams Richards

Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road
Jennifer L. Leo
This is an anthology of women's true stories. Writers include Ellen DeGeneres and Annie Lamott. I enjoyed it and I believe there is a couple other books in the same genre. Books Off My Reading List

I'm reading a memoir that has been on the TBR shelves for a while: Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking too Much by Natalie MacLean

Just finished Under Cover Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP
and now reading Of Boys and Men as I have 4 grandsons and want to know about their future world.

(just found this wonderful thread, thanks to ALL!)

Reading a wonderful work of history, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. The author has found a marvelous way of linking her expertise in an early period of history to concerns in the modern world. Very lively writing style. More history than a commentary on our current distraction via technology. Her chapter specifically devoted to books in this period was particularly informative.

>44 cmbohn: Definitely recommend. it's a bit lengthy, but worth the time reading.

I'm reading Code Girls, which, if I recall correctly was recommended by someone here. It's really good so far!

Having finished The Sirens' Call, I'm now looking to wrap up Century of Song in early April.

I've read several excellent non-fiction books so far this quarter.

The History of England: By a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian was short but an entertaining read, and read Brief Answers to the Big Questions tiwce this year, and will read it for the third time later this year

Find a Way
Diana Nyad
4/5 stars
This was an amazing autobiography of Diana Nyad, a professional long-distance swimmer who would never give up on her goals. She swam from Cuba to Florida after several failures and was able at the age of 64 to secure her goal. Biography

thanks to reading the world in books*i read about Voltair and realized Id never read candide!so I started it and almost finished What a great satire on our world, the same after 400 years 1!!!!

*this a wonderful book of 52 non fiction stories from gilgamus to present all of them western.....(would be good if some could write a book about 52 non fiction around the world ).....any way the author starts with firsr words in each essay, then give a summary , about the author, and suggest why the reader should read it and suggest furture reading. His writing is plain yet this reader felt each part was readable and interesting so when Voltair came up i realized I never read Candide
I now have a list of books that I need to read Look our bookstore here I come!

>77 JulieLill: Diana Nyad??
That has to be a chosen name to reflect her vocation!