NonFiction November: What's In My LineUp

This November, I'm tackling the stack of non-fiction books that I have faithfully collected through the years in an attempt to present myself as a well-rounded reader. Who's with me?!

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Nonfiction is tricky. I always gravitate towards nonfiction books at my local bookstores. There is something so appealing about picking up a book and becoming an expert on a topic you previously knew very little about. But when it really comes down to picking what I'm picking up next, I rarely reach for those dry non-fiction numbers. Listen, after a full day of reading at work, the last thing I want to do is struggle through a dense volume. BUT, I'm here to turn things around. I'm going non-fiction all the way this November. I'm peppering in memoirs to keep things nice and light, but I'm not going to shy away from a couple of straight shooting, non-fiction books as well. Keep reading to see what's on my list. Is there anything you think I should add? Tell me in the comments!

1. My Life on the Road: Gloria Steinem

From the Publisher: My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria’s growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality—and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference to her travels through Indian Country—a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world.

2. Difficult Women: Roxane Gay

From the Publisher: Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.

The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls' fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.

3. Mistakes I Made at Work: Various Authors

From the Publisher: In Mistakes I Made at Work, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Business Book for Spring 2014, Jessica Bacal interviews twenty-five successful women about their toughest on-the-job moments. These innovators across a variety of fields - from the arts to finance to tech - reveal that they're more thoughtful, purposeful and assertive as leaders because they learned from their mistakes, not because they never made any.

4. Kitchen Confidential: Anthony Bourdain

From the Publisher: A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—now with all-new, never-before-published material.

5. Global Woman: Barbara Ehrenrich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

From the Publisher: Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor results in an odd displacement, in which the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones―easing a "care deficit" in rich countries, while creating one back home.

Confronting a range of topics from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles, Global Woman offers an original look at a world increasingly shaped by mass migration and economic exchange. Collected and with an Introduction by bestselling social critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, this groundbreaking anthology reveals a new era in which the main resource extracted from developing nations is no longer gold or silver, but love.

6. Wild Game: Adrienne Brodeur

From the Publisher: Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It's a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.

Hmm, there seems to be a theme here. What can I say? I'm a feminist!

Keep reading,

L.S.