I forgot about Nonfiction November’s weekly prompts, so here’s another twofer!

Week 3 (11/13-11/17) Book Pairings:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)

The Four Winds (fiction) and The Worst Hard Time (nonfiction) are an obvious pair, both dealing with the Dust Bowl. American Dirt (fiction) and The Beast (nonfiction) both address why people are attempting to flee Mexico, and the violent horrors they face trying to make their way into the United States.

Week 4 (11/20-11/24) Worldview Shapers

One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone?

I’m writing a reflection on this to be posted later in the week for a special theme that will run Nov 22 to Nov 29 (guesses welcome on what connects those dates), so I won’t say too much here. Many books have had a huge effect on my thinking and worldview, and because I’ve been “reading in public” here since May 2007, I can go back and see my initial reactions to most of them. A few of the heavy hitters off the top of my head: Neil Postman’s Technopoly made me begin thinking critically about technology in my early twenties, helping me dodge the phone-addict bullet’; Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? was my first blush with anti-consumerism; Jim Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere gave me the vocabulary to understand why I hated some cities and loved others, and gave me an obsession with understanding how the built environment impacts human flourishing; Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations gave me a love for living philosophically; and The Death and Life of Great American Cities introduced me to emergent order and unwittingly served to push me from “conflicted progressive” to “conflicted libertarian”. It did this not by itself, but by adding a match to the growing pile of doubts I’d accumulated from college forward.