Nonfiction November 2018 - week 4

Nonfiction November is back! I love participating, and if you want to too, you can find more information here. Each week there is a new nonfiction post prompt. This week, it's talking about being an expert.

Week 4: Reads Like Fiction: Nonfiction books often get praised for how they stack up to fiction. Does it matter to you whether nonfiction reads like a novel? If it does, what gives it that fiction-like feeling? Does it depend on the topic, the writing, the use of certain literary elements and techniques? What are your favorite nonfiction recommendations that read like fiction? And if your nonfiction picks could never be mistaken for novels, what do you love about the differences?

I have to be completely honest. I have always resented the concept of "reads like fiction." To me, this concept has always devalued nonfiction and made fiction the penultimate form of writing. This has bothered me for a long time. As someone who read exclusively nonfiction for years, I will never see fiction as the standard by which nonfiction is gauged. I read nonfiction and fiction for completely different reasons. As someone who often regards nonfiction above fiction, because I value information above entertainment (I know both genres can inform and entertain, but the question itself separates the two, so I will, too, out of necessity), I have a hard time making fiction the rubric by which nonfiction is measured.

But I know what people mean when they use the term "reads like fiction." Something that reads like fiction is unbelievably believable. Its pace is superb. It brings you into the action (it has action), and keeps you there. It entertains. It informs. And maybe it even delivers a happy ending. In short, it delivers the best of both fiction and nonfiction.

Three of my favorite nonfiction books that meet these criteria are In the Kingdom of Ice, about a tragic sea voyage to the Arctic Circle; Seabiscuit, a biography of the prizewinning horse; Unbroken, the biography of a World War II prisoner of war who endured unimaginable torture at the hands of the Japanese, and The Spirit of St. Louis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of Charles Lindbergh that takes you on his transatlantic flight.

 

All three of these books show people (or horses) in extreme situations beating the odds, they make you understand yourself and others better, and they make your feel your humanity. I can't recommend them highly enough.