Welcome back, y’all! We’re up to twenty of these already! Thanks for sticking around!
We have some non-fiction this time around. I feel like non-fiction is one of my weakest genres to recommend in, or maybe I just don’t get an opportunity to recommend them a lot of the time. There’s also some fantasy fiction recs mixed in.
Have you recommended any books lately? Or perhaps you picked up a book based on a recent rec? Let me know in the comments!
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The Great Beanie Baby Bubble
I’ve been on a documentary kick and this is tied into a recommendation I got to watch the Beanie Baby documentary on HBO called Beanie Mania. I grew up during the Beanie Baby crazy and had a few of my own. I even remember going with a friend and her mother to a Beanie Baby expo.
In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. With no advertising or big-box distribution, creator Ty Warner – an eccentric college dropout – become a billionaire in just three years. And it was all thanks to collectors. The end of the craze was just as swift and extremely devastating, with “rare” Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they’d once been deemed priceless. Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews (including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the most extraordinary craze of the 1990s.
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The Harp of Kings
I gave this rec to a personal friend of mind who really wants to dive into fantasy and sci-fi right now. She asked for some immersive world building to get lost in.
A young woman is both a bard–and a warrior–in this thrilling historical fantasy from the author of the Sevenwaters novels.
Eighteen-year-old Liobhan is a powerful singer and an expert whistle player. Her brother has a voice to melt the hardest heart, and a rare talent on the harp. But Liobhan’s burning ambition is to join the elite warrior band on Swan Island. She and her brother train there to compete for places, and find themselves joining a mission while still candidates. Their unusual blend of skills makes them ideal for this particular job, which requires going undercover as traveling minstrels. For Swan Island trains both warriors and spies.
Their mission: to find and retrieve a precious harp, an ancient symbol of kingship, which has gone mysteriously missing. If the instrument is not played at the upcoming coronation, the candidate will not be accepted and the people could revolt. Faced with plotting courtiers and tight-lipped druids, an insightful storyteller, and a boorish Crown Prince, Liobhan soon realizes an Otherworld power may be meddling in the affairs of the kingdom. When ambition clashes with conscience, Liobhan must make a bold decision and is faced with a heartbreaking choice. . .
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How to Be Eaten
I’m obsessed with this concept and I recently hosted a virtual event with Maria and fairy tale academic Kate Bernheimer. This re-imagines popular fairy tale characters as they meet in a trauma support group.
A darkly funny and provocative debut novel that reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a PTSD support group
In present-day New York City, Ruby (Little Red Riding Hood), Gretel, Bernice (Bluebeard’s widow), Marlena (the miller’s daughter from Rumplestiltskin), and Ashlee (the winner of a Love Island-esque dating show, a new kind of fairy tale heroine) all meet in a basement support group to process their traumas.
Though they start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually these women begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed…What brought them here? What will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other?
Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women.
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Otherlands
I love non-fiction that is partitioned in a way. Like each chapter is a different subject, because it helps be digest these topics a little easier! Otherlands looks at extinct ecosystems and each chapter is a place.
“A kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time” (Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature), from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist
“This is as close to time travel as you are likely to get.”—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.
This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life.
Otherlands also offers us a vast perspective on the current state of the planet. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, for example, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone sounds improbable. But the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history.
Even as he operates on this broad canvas, Halliday brings us up close to the intricate relationships that defined these lost worlds. In novelistic prose that belies the breadth of his research, he illustrates how ecosystems are formed; how species die out and are replaced; and how species migrate, adapt, and collaborate. It is a breathtaking achievement: a surprisingly emotional narrative about the persistence of life, the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, and the scope of deep time, all of which have something to tell us about our current crisis.
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I love these recs! I think they expose me to stuff I wouldn’t hear about otherwise. I know these are all a bit cliche, but my favorite nonfiction books are THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN SIX GLASSES, and anything by Mary Roach. Some recent favorites are THE GOLDEN THREAD by Ravi Somaiya, THE BARBIZON:THE HOTEL THAT SET WOMEN FREE, COME FLY THE WORLD: THE JET SET AGE STORY OF THE WOMEN OF TRANS AM.
Some I’ve been trying to get into more “traditional history” nonfiction (think Barbara Tuchman, Tom Wolfe, WWII stuff etc), but I’m finding the problem with real history is that 1) it’s convoluted in a way fiction isn’t 2) In lots of times in history, way too many people had the same name. So many Henries and Williams in Western European history. . .
For English/European history, I enjoy Antonia Fraser’s biographies, particularly Marie Antoinette and Mary Stewart. She also wrote my all-time favorite non-fiction, The Weaker Vessel. This deals with lives of women of various classes during the 1700s.
For American history, I like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Goodwives is interesting and relatable. In Ulrich’s words ‘I wanted to write about Colonial/Puritan women who WEREN’T witches’ and she does.
Good treatment of the witch trials is Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare. She makes the point that the Salem trials were weird even in the context of other witch trials.
I have Otherlands on my online wish list – some family members use it for gift occasions so I make sure it’s populated. Last year I was given Consumed by Aja Barber and Wayfinding by M.R.O’Connor, completely different books but each was excellent. There’s a good interview with M.R.O’Connor on the podcast Science for the People from a few years ago.
Science for the People and Adam Conover’s Factually are great podcasts to get NF recs, for sure. I think both had on Gretchen McCullough for Because Internet and that pushed me to read it.
I started Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series based on a recommendation and the books so far are excellent with a great translation.
Also I would recommend, based off only 25 pages, The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings. Music is literally magic!!!! I also love the NOLA setting.
I’m kind of put off by this bit, tbh:
Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women.
None of the fairy tales mentioned in the blurb are or were ever intended to be “cozy.” Traditional fairy tales were dark as all hell! On purpose! And it looks like the author deliberately picked some of the stories that are particularly difficult to disguise as anything but dark af. Also there’s been any number of interesting dissections of fairy tales from all kinds of angles including feminist angles.
So… idk, I’m sure this is not the author’s fault at all, absolutely not irritated with the author, but the publisher seems to be trying to market this as something revolutionary when nothing about it sounds particularly revolutionary (cool premise, sure! but not radically new), and apparently this marketing decision bugs me more than it probably should. It falls too neatly into the general category of things-that-annoy-me that includes that time Elon Musk tried to reinvent the bus.
There is no way in the world I could ever force myself to read about the Beanie Baby craze. I drove all over a foreign country where we were living at the time, (1999) barely speaking the language, and eight months pregnant, because my older children were counting on Santa bringing specific Beanie Babies. We still have boxes of them in the basement – I’m sure (!) they’ll be worth something any day now.
@Star: “In novelistic prose that belies the breadth of his research” gave me an “Excuse you?” moment, as well. Silly me, I’d almost forgotten “well-researched” and “entertaining” are mortal enemies that can only be cast in opposition!
I’m increasingly convinced marketing is dominated by the sort of people who think “Hey, gorgeous, I gotta get you locked down before you lose 20 pounds” is a brilliant pickup line.
A friend told me her mother-in-law would fund college educations for all her grandkids with Beanie Babies. I don’t think that worked out for her.
One of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in years is The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. If you’re someone who wears clothing or has sheets on your bed, you’ll be educated in a very entertaining way.
One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read with a romance novel connection is “Bury the Chains” by Adam hochschild. It’s about the British slave trade abolition movement about 1800. This is effort referenced in a number of more serious regency/Georgian romance novels. It has a mass movement by concerned citizens, petitions to Parliament, a principal character of color, a hero in Thomas Clarkson, and a (somewhat incidental) romance to boot. Some of its content is covered in the movie “Amazing Grace” that includes the origin of the famous song, a somewhat exaggerated role of William Wilberforce and a true romance.
I enjoyed both and suspect people who like more serious-minded romances might like it as well. The book isn’t cheap, but many libraries should have a copy.
I missed most of the beanie baby furor, but I still remember overhearing a couple of women talking about how they’d bought them but kept them pristine in their boxes and wouldn’t let kids play with them in order to preserve their “value.”
I’m also slightly entranced by the Beanie Baby thing–I loved them as a kid, had so much fun with them; they were very charming and another kind of storytelling inspiration. They weren’t super hard to find in my area, either… I did start keeping the tags on and got a few slightly higher priced ones, but nothing over the top. Def got some out of completism or figuring out my tastes (learned I don’t like teddy bear style anything) and so in the last couple of years I’ve sorted thru the two boxes of them I have and cut down the ones I want to keep by a little over half. They’re a good childhood memory and some are still really adorable.
And that’s the thing about the whole “craze”: for the people who genuinely liked them, it wasn’t the horror show these documentaries often focus on. The issue was that the people who were selling them at very high prices were also the ones *writing the price guides* and TY was deliberately manipulating the market, and then the people who wanted to make money/”invest” or who got caught up in the thrill of the hunt, completism over genuine enjoyment, suffered.
I see people compare them to funko pops all the time, but I just don’t think the collector community is as easily fooled now and the worth is a little more naturally set, the collectability also determined by fandom. But anyone who buys a collectable just because it seems to be wanted by a lot of other people, or solely with the intent to resell it, has to be aware that the more people who do what they do the less their chance of making money and the greater their chance of remorse.
So in these theme my nonfiction rec is “Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters: Inside His Films, Notebooks, and Collections”; it’s out of print, sadly, but if you can find a copy it’s really interesting and if not, Amazon has some images at least. He has HOUSES full of his collections but he talks about how meaningful each piece is to him, how he doesn’t add items of out completism. We have this idea that we live either with minimalism or clutter (Marie Kondo has to say over and over that she is NOT promoting minimalism, yet people still mindlessly parrot that she is) but the reality is that a third path exists. (And personally I love that aesthetically it’s hard to find two people more different than del Toro and Kondo, yet when you examine their ethos you find they’re actually very similar.)
Two nonfiction recs: The Invisible Kingdom: Reimaging Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke is a fantastic book about autoimmune disorders and other chronic illness. It really helped me get my head around a lupus diagnosis. It also addresses the disparities in the health care system and the way doctors treat patients, esp women, with autoimmune disorders.
Completely different — Mel Brooks’s biography.
@AtasB
I would love to read a romance novel with that type of Guillermo del Toro/Marie Kondo combination – they’re so different, but also so alike, how can it ever work out for these two crazy kids, etc. I’m thinking low on romantic angst, high on details about work competency.