My Year in Nonfiction

Nonfiction November runs for 5 weeks from today! As always, week 1 is ‘My Year in NF’, and is hosted by Heather. I’ve participated since 2017! My best ever NF year was 2019 when I read 33 books, making up 25% of my total.

This year, I’ve read the fewest non-fiction books for ages, just 9 books so far this year, plus 3 in Nov/Dec 2024 to make it the full year. That’s currently under 10% of my total for the year (Yes, I’ve been busier than ever this year and my reading volume is down).

• The After-Life of Brian by Julian Doyle – (6.5/10) Review
• Dear Orson Welles, and other essays by Mark Cousins – (8/10) Review
• Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench – (10/10) Review
• The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada – Tr (9/10) Review
•  Bowieland by Peter Carpenter –  (10/10) Review
•  Alive by Gabriel Weston – (8.5/10) Review
• The Future of Gardens by Mark Lane – (8/10) Review
• Mythos by Stephen Fry (approx 220 pages) Review
• Oleander, Jacaranda by Penelope Lively – (7.5/10) Review
•  A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever by Rob Reiner et al – (8.5/10) Review
• Making it so by Patrick Stewart – (9/10) Review
• Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne – (10/10)

You’ll see that three out of the twelve were absolute crackers – I scored them 10/10.

Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench: Written with Brendan O’Hea, an actor/director friend of Dench, and Associate Artistic Director at the Globe Theatre in London. You could view the structure as primarily a series of interviews or discussions, but the pair come over more as friends having a good chat which makes for the most entertaining and interesting reading. O’Hea, who really knows his Shakespeare too, gently nudges Dench into full flow, talking with passion and insight about all the different Shakespeare women roles she has acted over her many decades in the theatre, from one of the fairies in Dream to her favourite, Lady Macbeth, interspersed with other thoughts on acting, and all sprinkled liberally with hilarious anecdotes about her acting, directing and other colleagues and life in the theatre in general. O’Hea comments on how many expletives he’s removed from the text, Dench is known for being sweary! A sheer delight.

Bowieland by Peter Carpenter: I’m a sucker for anything Bowie-related, but Carpenter’s book about his pilgrimage around Bowie sites mainly in the UK, but including a trip to Berlin, was superb. Told by his doctors after a heart-bypass op that the best thing he could do to further improve his health was walk, Carpenter took them at their word and did just that. A huge Bowie fan, a project evolved to make a pilgrimage to sites that were pertinent to Bowie’s life, to see if they still resonate now, to link up with anyone who knew him when he was there, and putting them into the context of his life and work. Carpenter makes no attempt to organise his trips into chronological order and likewise doesn’t order them in the book either, keeping to his own timeline as he did them, allowing reflection. Throughout, Carpenter combines the stories of Bowie-lore with impressions of each location today in true psycho-geographer mode but building in elements of memoir along the way. A winning combination for me.

Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne: I’ve yet to review this in full, but Dunthorne’s memoir of his German-Jewish family is profoundly moving and shocking, yet he tells the story of his great-grandfather in particular who worked for the company who invented radium toothpaste, then got diverted into making chemical weapons for the Nazis before managing to escape to Turkey, with great self-deprecation and some fab throwaway one-liners. I went to see him talk about the book and it was a marvellous evening and he is such a lovely man.

As for my plans for the month – I shall be reading memoirs – I have three crackers lined up, beginning with Kathy Burke.