Citizen Reader

Nonfiction trends 2012: part 2

In which we consider some nonfiction book trends for the coming year, and how they all make me want to stop reading, and then poke my eyes out for good measure.*

In addition to political books, it seems like there are a ton of History and Historical Biography titles coming out. (And a lot of Historical Biographies are related to politics; consider titles like John F. Kennedy, by Alan Brinkley; Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World, by William Lee Miller; Eisenhower in War and Peace, by Jean Edward Smith; Reagan and Thatcher, by Richard Aldous, etc.) And not only are there a lot of History books, there are a lot of History books on subjects and with angles that leave me cold (for various reasons):

Ike's Spies, by Stephen Ambrose (Ambrose is a big fat plagiarizer)

Freedom's Forge: How American Business Built the Arsenal of Democracy that Won World War II, by Arthur Herman (see? America was great once! All we need is another "great" war for which we can manufacture a ton of weapons--that will keep people employed and make America great again!)

Enterprise: America's Fightingest Ship and the Men Who Helped Win World War II, by Barrett Tilman (WWII! WWII! Keep writing about WWII and Americans will never notice anything is wrong currently!)

Now, this is unfair of me. There are actually a lot of forthcoming History books that have nothing to do with World War II and look decent. But I can't say that any of the titles in the spreadsheet or on this list light me on fire. What do you think?

*Sorry to be such a melodramatic grouch about it. But really. All of these new nonfiction titles bore me to death, and that's just the titles! Imagine getting stuck reading these entire books. Ugh.

2012 nonfiction trends: part 1.

In my trolling for forthcoming nonfiction titles I formulated some ideas about what's going to be big in nonfiction this year. These trends are, of course, based on my opinion--I've never really looked at or considered trends before, so I can't speak to my accuracy. All I can really tell you is that I looked at more than 300 forthcoming nonfiction titles, as well as a number of various blog and journal articles, to formulate these ideas.

So what's going to be big, and why?

I have two words that are bound to strike fear into the heart of anyone who never had or has completely lost any interest in politics: Election Year. God help us all, but 2012 is a big election year and correspondingly, political and current events books are going to be big. Not only will candidates be putting out their own books and having books written about them, plenty of authors are getting in on the subject. In addition to current political titles, there's a number of big political historical biographies coming out.

Curious about what the actual politics titles are? Please check the spreadsheet I posted a link to Monday*, or check out a condensed list of forthcoming political titles here.

I can't be objective about these titles; the very idea of reading any of these books makes me want to puke, but I'd like to give an extra special pukey shout-out to Dennis Prager's title Still the Last Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph, which is described at Prager's website as explaining how "Humanity stands at a crossroads, and the only alternatives to the 'American Trinity' of liberty, natural rights, and the melting-pot ideal of national unity are Islamic totalitarianism, European democratic socialism, capitalist dictatorship, or global chaos if we should fail."**

But if you're interested in politics? This is going to be a very good nonfiction year for you.

*A word about the spreadsheet. It's organized by genre, but those are my genre headings. Where I use the heading "name memoir," that means "celebrity memoirs." Also, books tagged with my genre heading "Malcolm Gladwell," are variously known as "Making Sense..." books, "Big Idea" books, "Big Think" books, and many other headings. I tend to call them Malcolm Gladwell books, myself, since his titles (e.g., The Tipping Point) are the best known in the genre.

**Does this sentence even make sense? It's hard for me to tell, I get bored in the middle of it and can't view it as a whole.

Tuesday Article: The real problem with the economy.

I really enjoy reading the Christian Science Monitor online, although it's typically depressing as hell.

I found this article (written by Robert Reich) on one of the biggest problems in our economy echoed what I've been thinking for years but could never verbalize so well. If you don't have time to read the whole article, here's one of my favorite paragraphs out of it:

"The crisis of American capitalism marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens. And since most of us occupy all four roles – even though the lion’s share of consuming and investing is done by the wealthy – the real crisis centers on the increasing efficiency by which all of us as consumers and investors can get great deals, and our declining capacity to be heard as workers and citizens."

Incidentally, speaking of deals (or things that are not deals), someone posted yesterday on my post from a million years ago about Melissa & Doug products being crap. I share the comment here in its entirety because I will not rest, people, until all of you stop buying Melissa & Doug products. Thank you.

"Heh! I submitted a one-star review of a dreadful M&D product we were given -- a $35 set of dollar-store craft supplies with 'washable' paint that permanently trashed an easel, table, a bit of the floor, and so much clothing I have difficulty thinking about it, before I realised 'washable' was not 'washable.' The review was never posted. I got an e-mail from "Lisa" thanking me for my "e-mail" with an invitation to call her during [rather restricted times]. I wrote back to say I appreciated the response, but was extremely pressed for time and was not going to have time to make a phone call anytime soon; could she please address this in e-mail? Of course I didn't hear back, and of course my review simply didn't make it on the site. melissaanddoug.com is littered with enthusiastic four and five star reviews; I haven't been able to find any poor ratings or reviews. Apparently they are all simply trashed as mine was, perhaps with a half-hearted attempt at contact from "Lisa." At least the paint disaster was bad enough for me to be rude enough to finally ask the person who had been buying us all the M&D stuff to please stop..."

Thanks for the comment, K.

Looking at 2012 nonfiction trends.

Somewhere in the middle of my neverending nonfiction reading slump I gave a presentation (for the Outagamie Waupaca Library System continuing education program--thanks again for hiring me!) on nonfiction trends in 2012.

As I told the attendees, it was somewhat hilarious for me to be giving a talk on trends. Me and any kind of "trends" are rarely in the same room together. I've never  particularly cared what the "it" books of each season are (I do, but more out of professional curiosity than out of a burning desire to read them myself) and I'm definitely not up on fashion trends. I put on a "work outfit" to give the presentation--it was given through web meeting software, and no one could see me, but I find it gives a little "oomph" to your presentation to be dressed professionally (or as "professionally" as I can manage)--and the sweater I was wearing was about fifteen years old. Pathetic. But I was happy to be speaking on a new topic--a topic about newness, if you will, so I read what I could and researched what I could to try and suss out some nonfiction trends of the coming year.

While researching the trends, I threw together a quick spreadsheet of nonfiction titles that will be coming out this year. I entered the authors and titles, the month they're coming out, and then assigned some quick-n-dirty genre headings. You can download that spreadsheet yourself; it can be sorted alphabetically by author or title, by genre (which is how it's sorted now), or by release month. All week I'll be talking about what I learned putting that spreadsheet together, so buckle your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy trends ride.

I'm really overthinking storytime.

CRjr and I are just back from a library storytime for one- and two-year-olds. He's taking a short nap, and I feel like I should also. Just to recover.

Now, storytime was just fine. Very nice, in fact. Some songs and singing, clapping and hand motions, a few stories, and then some coloring for those who wanted to. Lots of other little kids and their moms. (Yes, all moms or female nannies.)

So why did the whole scene make me so tired?

Now, I think CRjr enjoyed himself okay. He didn't seem too interested at first, but when the program started he faced forward (sitting on my lap, he wiggled back towards me after starting on a little carpet) and watched carefully. Of course we didn't know some of the songs and hand motions but everyone else seemed to, and we caught up after a while. The stories were good, the librarian kept things moving around nicely, and CRjr definitely enjoyed just looking around.

But my question is this: is it really important that CRjr learn the movements to "The Wheels on the Bus"?* That he learn to follow along with what everyone else is doing? To me it seemed eerily like preparing him for school, which will prepare him for an office job of some sort. To quote something I tell CRjr about unsuitable things to touch: Ucky.

But of course I am overthinking it. It doesn't help that CRjr seems by nature not to be much of a follower. He's hitting his gross and fine motor skill benchmarks, but the boy refuses to play things like patty cake. I should know--I've been trying to play patty cake with him for months now. He laughs and engages while I do the motions, but he seems uninclined to play the game with me. So, like any mother who just wants her kid to fit in with the crowd, I feel a little like we stick out, and it makes me nervous. I know it shouldn't.

I think we'll go next week. CRjr doesn't know enough to look forward to it, and I definitely won't, which seems the wrong attitude to have. But there you have it.

*I know it probably is important. But it's so hard for me to understand why. I was not taken to the library or storytimes (not because Mom didn't love me; it just wasn't something they did) and I learned to read and interact just fine.

A memoir for the Anglophiles.

It hasn't been all doom and gloom around here as far as nonfiction reading is concerned. In the last few weeks there have been several bright spots in my reading, and one of them was Michael Frayn's memoir My Father's Fortune: A Life.

Frayn is a British playwright and novelist, although I have never read any of his plays or novels. In fact, why I requested this book from the library on one of my regular browses through the new nonfiction releases in the catalog, I'll never know. I think I was aware he's British, and so, of course, I might be interested in his book.

Frayn recounts the life of his father, Tom Frayn, from birth to death. (Making this a blend of biography and memoir, although the majority of the book is told from Frayn's point of view as a child growing up in his father's household.) And he does a really nice job of showing how even the ordinary life of a British salesman and father, is anything but ordinary.

My favorite parts of the book actually came in the beginning, with Frayn describing his father's life as the beloved baby of the family, growing up among family members who were all either completely or almost completely deaf. The circumstances in which his father grew up certainly gave me pause:

 "My grandparents' house had four rooms, apart from the kitchen, and according to the 1901 census there were two other couples also living there. Presumably each of these couples occupied one of the rooms. So my grandparents and their four teenage children must have been living in the two remaining rooms. Two adults and four adolescents in two rooms--and all ten residents, presumably, sharing the kitchen...And now here's the new baby chucking his food under the table and screaming his lungs out, with his nappies being boiled on the copper...In the morning everyone trying to get their breakfast, and hot water for shaving, and their clothes pressed and ready for work.* All of them wanting the one lavatory, which at that time was presumably a privy in the back garden." (pp. 13-14.)

Really. Just PICTURE all that. It is a credit to Frayn's writing that he makes it easy to picture.

And the whole book is like that. It's a great picture of life in Great Britain, life in the lower middle class trying to cling to respectability, life as a child in England during World War II, and life as a family member in any number of relationships (as father, as son, as nephew, etc.). It's a great book, and I had to stop several times while I was reading it and just savor it. That, to me, is one of the marks of a very fine book indeed.

*Boiling nappies on the stove AND still having to press your clothes. Christ, I can barely make it in life even with disposable diapers and wrinkle-free shirts. People were made of sterner stuff then.

Bill Moyers is back.

Last night I was flipping through channels and remembered, when I saw PBS, that Bill Moyers is back on TV with a program called Moyers and Company.

I called my mother to let her know he was on, and she was tickled that he was back, but annoyed that he was on at the same time as 60 Minutes and Dateline. Then she called back later to let me know she'd left Moyers on, and it was a super-interesting program. So there's a tagline the new Moyers program can use--"Moyers and Company: Sufficiently interesting to tear the old folks away from Dateline!"

Why write a book when you can just copy and paste and sell someone else's?

If you've got a spare moment, you might find this article* about rampant plagiarism going on under the heading of "self-publishing" at Amazon interesting. Sad, but interesting.

This is my favorite line, personally: "Perhaps, though, Amazon doesn't care if it sells plagiarized works; it benefits from the sale whether it holds back an author's royalties or not."

Hm. Perhaps.

*Via Bookslut.

Escapism.

It's official: I am Not Myself.

It's now been weeks since I have plowed through any quantities of nonfiction. I did read Gene Weingarten's The Fiddler in the Subway, and have been reading magazines, but for me that's kind of the equivalent of not reading any nonfiction at all. I like to have at least three books going or I feel at sea.

On the other hand, I have been plowing through the Anne of Green Gables series, and have lately been considering getting more mysteries and perhaps some other fiction from the library. Of course I forget the titles now but I have been seeing some fiction titles pop up that at least seem interesting (and I'm very eager to get John Green's new book The Fault in Our Stars, but I'm a ways down the hold list for that one).

This has led me to think of what I need from reading. Over the course of the last ten years or so I have not been an escapist reader. (I've actually been a little disdainful of escapist, particularly genre, reading--just ask Mr. CR, as I pick on his genre bookshelves just for fun.) But just lately I find I have been craving reading from an escapism standpoint. Typically I love current affairs and investigative and history books, but lately every one of them I see just makes me think: Ugh. I do not know why this is. I'm not particularly stressed and actually have enjoyed good health for some time. So why do I need to escape now?

Part of me is wondering if it's just the nature of the beast when you are a girl. Really. That sounds horribly sexist but it's definitely a theory. Perhaps women, tired of juggling thoughts of work, home care, child and other family care, and friendship management, just do not have the strength left over for nonfiction (most of the time). This would partially explain why studies show that women tend to read (and buy) more fiction than men. Which is not to say men don't have concerns--they do. But I think men might be better about not having concerns about one thing (say, home) while they're dealing with another thing (say, work). What think you? Tell me in the comments.

Uninspired.

A bit of housekeeping this morning that probably should have been done last week. Barely two weeks into 2012 and I'm already behind. Sigh.

First, many thanks to everyone who shared holiday and new year wishes over the past few weeks. I appreciated it, very much.

Secondly, I am sorry for the lack of posting. It is part of a greater, multi-part problem, which primarily consists of:

1. I have read hardly any nonfiction over the past month.

2. I have read hardly anything, a re-read of Anne of the Island (by Lucy Maud Montgomery) at bedtime notwithstanding, over the past month.

3. I am not finding anything I want to read, fiction or non, and the coming crop of 2012 books bores me to tears. More on this later.

4. When I am not reading, I am not sure what to do with the blog. This will most likely be a bit of a long-term problem, as I quite simply do not have as much time for reading (or blog writing) as I used to. I could blame CRjr for this, as it turns out it is work to care for another human being, even a blessedly healthy, happy, little one. Instead I will blame the universe for not letting me be born into an independently very wealthy family. You know, the kind of family with copious spare time and the financial wherewithal to hire nannies with backgrounds in childhood development and a second language they could teach my child.

So, what to do? Well, one immediate solution that comes to mind was suggested by a commenter (thank you--you know who you are): it is time to have a Book Menage. But I'm currently at low ebb on ideas. Does anyone have any nonfiction or fiction titles they'd like to suggest, or possible themes? Please list them in the comments, and we'll schedule a Menage discussion. Beyond that there will be some other posts this week about reading and nonfiction in general--stay tuned!