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I spent November immersed in nonfiction books. Unfortunately, a rapidly expanding TBR list is a side effect of reading and researching nonfiction. Now I want to read everything! Here are the books I discovered during November. I can't wait to get them in my hot little hands.
New To My Reading List
A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear: The Utopian Plot To Liberate An American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Recommended by Based On A True Story
Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road.
When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness.
The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity.
A Libertarian Walks into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment—to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
Why I want to read it: Once upon a time, I wrote a book about cults that was nearly published 29 times. This is one of the stories that I researched extensively for my book. I'm glad somebody else wrote a book about it because it's a bizarre story that needs to be told. (Also, laws about wildlife exist for a reason. Don't mess with bears, you weirdos!)
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Pseudoscience: An Amusing History Of Crackpot Ideas And Why We Love Them by Lydia Kang & Nate Pedersen
Recommended by Book'd Out
From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically.
Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science–that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in things we know aren't true.
Why I want to read it: These authors wrote another book called Quackery. It's one of my favorite medical nonfiction books because it taught me so many ways to not cure diseases. I hope Pseudoscience is just as quirky.
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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
Recommended by Words And Peace
There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works . . .
Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tons. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.
In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behavior with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.
Why I want to read it: Fun fact: I'm scared of mushrooms. They know too much! Hopefully this book will teach me what they know so I'm prepared when they take over the world. I welcome our mushroom overlords.
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Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life And Change The World by Scott Shigeoka
Recommended by Lisa Notes
Political blow-ups, vaccine controversy, religious freedom, climate change, gender rights—division, loneliness, and polarization have ripped us apart. Our friendships are strained, teams at work can't find common ground, families are divided, and healing feels out of reach . . . but it doesn’t have to.
Internationally-recognized curiosity expert Scott Shigeoka knows that the radical practice of Deep Curiosity, rooted in a desire to understand ourselves and others beneath the surface, holds our only path to connection and transformation.
Why I want to read it: Well, first I want to know how somebody becomes an "internationally-recognized curiosity expert." That sounds like a made-up job. Also, it sounds like my next career goal. Anyway, I'm on a quest to find a self-help book that actually helps. This might be my next target.
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Gulp: Adventures On The Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
Recommended by Autobiography Of A Bookworm
Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.
Why I want to read it: Mary Roach is my favorite nonfiction writer. I'll eventually read all of her books. This one might be next. She's hilarious and asks the weirdest questions.
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The Ship Beneath The Ice: The Discovery Of Shackleton's Endurance by Mensun Bound
Recommended by Musings Of A Literary Wanderer
On November 21, 1914, after sailing more than ten thousand miles from Norway to the Antarctic Ocean, the Endurance finally succumbed to the surrounding ice. Ernest Shackleton and his crew had navigated the 144-foot, three-masted wooden vessel to Antarctica to become the first to cross the barren continent, but early season pack ice trapped them in place offshore. They watched in silence as the ship's stern rose twenty feet in the air and disappeared into the frigid sea, then spent six harrowing months marooned on the ice in its wake. Seal meat was their only sustenance as Shackleton's expedition to push the limits of human strength took a new form: one of survival against the odds.
As this legendary story entered the annals of polar exploration, it inspired a new global race to find the wrecked Endurance, by all accounts "the world's most unreachable shipwreck." Several missions failed, thwarted, as Shackleton was, by the unpredictable Weddell Sea. Finally, a century to the day after Shackleton's death, renowned marine archeologist Mensun Bound and an elite team of explorers discovered the lost shipwreck. Nearly ten thousand feet below the ice lay a remarkably preserved Endurance, its name still emblazoned on the ship's stern.
Why I want to read it: If you saw my book pairings post, then you know I love stories about explorers. I've read a few books about Shackleton, but I've never read a book about the discovery of his wrecked ship.
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Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine K. Albright
Recommended by Readerbuzz
The twentieth century was defined by the clash between democracy and Fascism, a struggle that created uncertainty about the survival of human freedom and left millions dead. Given the horrors of that experience, one might expect the world to reject the spiritual successors to Hitler and Mussolini should they arise in our era. In Fascism: A Warning, Madeleine Albright draws on her experiences as a child in war-torn Europe and her distinguished career as a diplomat to question that assumption.
Why I want to read it: *Gestures vaguely at everywhere.*
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The Lost City Of The Monkey God by Douglas Preston
Recommended by Bemused & Bookish
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God—but then committed suicide without revealing its location.
Three quarters of a century later, author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.
Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal—and incurable—disease.
Why I want to read it: Another explorer book! I can't pass those up. I think it would be fun to venture into places that humans have rarely seen. Well, it would be fun until you caught an incurable disease. The fun meter probably drops rapidly after that.
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Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering The Wisdom Of The Forest by Suzanne Simard
Recommended by Unsolicited Feedback
Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
Why I want to read it: I want to know how plants communicate. I think we don't give plants enough credit for being intelligent. I want to be prepared when they team up with mushrooms to take over the world.
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Arbitrary Death: A Prosecutor's Perspective On the Death Penalty by Rick Unklesbay
Recommended by Lisa Notes
Over a career spanning nearly four decades, Rick Unklesbay has tried over one hundred murder cases before juries that ended with sixteen men and women receiving the death sentence. Arbitrary Death depicts some of the most horrific murders in Tucson, Arizona, the author's prosecution of those cases, and how the death penalty was applied. It provides the framework to answer why America is the only western country to still use the death penalty. Can a human-run system treat those cases fairly and avoid unconstitutional arbitrariness?
It is an insider's view from someone who has spent decades prosecuting murder cases and who now argues that the death penalty doesn't work and our system is fundamentally flawed.
Why I want to read it: Fun fact: When I was in college, I had an entire blog about the history and ethics of the death penalty. Nobody read the blog, but that's okay because I find the topic fascinating.
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The Quiet Damage: QAnon And The Destruction Of The American Family by Jesselyn Cook
Recommended by Based On A True Story
“Shed my DNA”: three excruciating words uttered by a QAnon-obsessed mother, once a highly respected lawyer, to her only son, once the closest person in her life. QAnon beliefs and adjacent conspiracy theories have had devastating political consequences as they’ve exploded in popularity. What’s often overlooked is the lasting havoc they wreak on our society at its most basic and intimate level—the family.
In The Quiet Damage, celebrated reporter Jesselyn Cook paints a harrowing portrait of the vulnerabilities that have left so many of us susceptible to outrageous falsehoods promising order, purpose, and control. Braided throughout are the stories of five American families: an elderly couple whose fifty-year romance takes a heartbreaking turn; millennial sisters of color who grew up in dire poverty—one to become a BLM activist, the other, a hardcore conspiracy theorist pulling her little boy down the rabbit hole with her; a Bay Area hippie-type and her business-executive fiancé, who must decide whether to stay with her as she turns into a stranger before his eyes; evangelical parents whose simple life in a sleepy suburb spirals into delusion-fueled chaos; and a rural mother-son duo who, after carrying each other through unspeakable tragedy, stop speaking at all as ludicrous untruths shatter a bond long thought unbreakable.
Charting the arc of each believer’s path from their first intersection with conspiracy theories to the depths of their cultish conviction, to—in some cases—their rejection of disinformation and the mending of fractured relationships, Cook offers a rare, intimate look into the psychology of how and why ordinary people come to believe the unbelievable.
Why I want to read it: Because I live in a part of Colorado known as the Fox News Cinematic Universe. It's strange and uncomfortable in here. My neighbor used to have QAnon stickers on his pickup truck. I feel like I could relate to this book.
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Which nonfiction books are on your to-be-read list?
Yay, so glad one of my recs made your list! I think you're going to love it!
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