Tuesday, April 12, 2016

10 Non-fiction Books on my To Read List

To be honest, I don't read very much nonfiction. (Part of me wants to hyphenate nonfiction, but that doesn't seem right... Oh, to be lost in the mind of an English teacher - guess I'll just go with my gut and leave it without the hyphen.) Back to reading nonfiction - I want to change that about myself, but I sometimes find that nonfiction is just too dry for my tastes. Plus, I simply prefer the idea of getting lost in another time or place or lives of characters. That sense of immersion, that feeling of being transported is much harder for me to achieve with nonfiction, even when I'm reading memoirs. One of the things I promised myself this year was to try to read a bit more nonfiction than I would normally. As such, here's a list of nonfiction books I've marked on Goodreads as ones that pique my interest and might challenge my thinking.

1.  The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp

2.  Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit for Less by Greg McKeown

3. Free Will by Sam Harris

4. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

5. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

6. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things No One Told You about Being Creative by Austin Kleon

7. Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations by Alex Harris

8. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

9. Teaching Big History by Richard B. Simon

10. Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write by Henriette Ann Klauser

I'll be looking for these online and at the public library; I absolutely have to draw the line at spending money on nonfiction books. C'mon now, there are way too many fabulous novels out there that I need to purchase. The nonfiction ones will have to be freebies. Haha!

4 comments:

  1. Tiffany, I'm with you in regard to fiction vs nonfiction. I just checked and currently have 209 books on my Goodreads To-read list. I would guess that maybe nine of them are nonfiction. I will say that when I travel I am intrigued by the history of my destination but have yet to read a history book to answer my questions. Rick Steves' synopses tend to suffice!!

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  2. I would say I'm about 80/20 in my reading ratio of fiction to nonfiction. I borrow most books I read from my local library via my iPad. Some of the nonfiction end up as hard copy purchases as underlining and sticky noting don't work well for me.

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  3. Are you stealing from my goodreads list? Lol

    My oldest son loved loved Do Hard Things ... I just read it with my 15 year old he didn't love it as much but I think ideas from it still stuck with him.

    I got Steal Like An Artist and the Steal Like An Artist journal for Christmas - good stuff.

    I'm working my way through Teaching Big History and taking a Big History course via Coursera right now in preparation for building a class for my homeschooler boys this fall.

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  4. i read the creative habit by twyla tharp. her exercises and points of view were different than other creativity books, & new to me. i like non-fiction especially art books & memoirs, but i adore fiction too. most of my books i get at the library. i've really been enjoying the books i can listen to from the library on an app on my phone. i heard maya angelou recite her book. it was beautiful. would poetry or her short stories be considered non-fiction?

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