Nonfiction November Week 1
Nonfiction November has arrived and this year I’m going to try to join in.
This week, we’re all looking back at our year of nonfiction, and for me, that’s pretty sad: my favourite NF books were cookbooks. In fact, the majority of nonfiction I perused this year was about food: cooking it (Sheet Pan Suppers, The Fibromyalgia Cookbook, One Pot French, Edwardian Cooking: The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook, Salad in a Jar, Fermented Vegetables), avoiding it (Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Loce 25 Pounds in 50 Days, Eat it Later: Mastering Self-Control and the Slimming Power of Postponement), or digesting it (Gut: the Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ).
Out of the handful of non-cookbooks I read, I most enjoyed The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose.
Rose chose a shelf of (ironically) fiction books in her library and read each of them, reporting on her progress, the history behind the books, and other literary tidbits.
However, the book I recommended the most was a short memoir about buying a old farmhouse in southern France and living there part of each year. Beginning French: Lessons from a Stone Farmhouse by Les Americains is charming and includes mouth-watering recipes. (There we go with food again.)
Although I read two other memoirs (Wildflower by Drew Barrymore and Paris Nights) and a microhistory (Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition), I missed reading history or biographies that include history. I’m looking forward to getting some great ideas in that area this month from the other participants in Non-Fiction November.
Bring it on!
P.S. The links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog
Loren Stephens
The second order was at the Duke of Duckworth, a downtown St. John’s institution of sorts. It hides on McMurdo’s Lane, a stairway that climbs the cliff between Water Street (below) and Duckworth Street. I’m afraid my attempt to photograph it doesn’t do it justice. Fans of CBC’s uber-popular 
In the winter of 2013-14, while I was living in Ontario in my late mother’s house, my husband was home in Nova Scotia and had to deal with the death of both of our dogs. Wes, our Labrador Retriever, was old and arthritic and we had known that that would be his last winter. But Farlow, our Valley Bulldog mix, was still young and vital, and died suddenly of a cancerous tumour that burst.
There are two books that I read in May 2014 that I rated 4½ stars at the time, but that have stayed with me so that now, at this review, I have raised the ratings to a full five stars. The Art of Racing the Rain is one of those books.
This is the second book on which I’m raising the 4½ stars to a full five. This book continues to haunt me.
In mid-1970s apartheid S. Africa, medical student Isaac Muthethe has himself smuggled out of the country into Botswana. He is in danger in his home country because he witnessed the murder of a friend by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn, who has followed her husband to Africa. The white dog of the title is a stray that shows up just when Isaac is dropped off in Botswana, and that attaches itself to the young man.
Amazon says: “Narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.”
time-traveling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome’s singular, and hilarious, 
Amazon: “Created by a German mad scientist in the 19th century, the monster dogs possess human intelligence, speak human language, have prosthetic humanlike hands and walk upright on hind legs. The dogs’ descendants arrive in New York City in the year 2008, still acting like Victorian-era aristocrats.”
Cyrus Mills inherits his father’s veterinary practice and returns to his hometown with the intention of selling the business and leaving again. Of course, his patients change his mind.
Which should have been wonderful, since I really love railroads. But this book is a debut centering on the Great Flood of 1927 along the Mississippi, a tragedy that killed 246 people and left countless families homeless. The flood led to the great migration of African American families toward other states, and Bill Cheng’s first novel hones in on one fictional family whose experiences seem to represent an endless cycle of grief and loss.
I have watched with interest as Simon at 
If you know A Streetcar Named Desire only from snatched clips or even just your friends’ impersonation of Brando’s “STELLL- AHHHHH!”, as I had, then you’ve missed the quality of this writing. But even if you can’t attend a live production of Streetcar, you can still access the beauty of this play in the written word – a slim 179-page volume that reads quickly and easily and, thanks to many school curricula, continues to be in print.
Finally got around to reading this ‘classic’. Plath’s description of Esther’s descent into depression was so accurate a mirror of my own feelings, it was at once frightening and comforting. How far I could have fallen!
Recommended by my daughter. My first Urquhart. Set between Ireland and Canada in the mid-1800s. Thought-provoking and enjoyable. Made me want more specific history.
[2016 notes: Amazon says “Here’s the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock, a small-town greaser whose claim to fame was hitting a baseball clean across the Pembina River, almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals — but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller of Cleveland Indian Fame in Renfrew Park, Edmonton, Alberta.”
Heat oil in a large, high-sided skillet over medium-low heat. Add onions and cover. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are tender and beginning to turn golden, about 15 minutes. 
Next book up was 
The three best known and lauded books by author Josephine Tey appear to be Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair (both in the Alan Grant series), and Brat Farrar. The last of these, a stand-alone novel, was my favourite book in April 2014.
Harvest focuses on the inhabitants of a remote English village at an undetermined time in what is likely the past.
The work of D.E. Stevenson was recommended to me by our head librarian on one of my brief visits to our beautiful relatively new village library. We found on the shelf Vittoria Cottage, published in 1949 and the first of a trilogy.
This is the story of four middle-aged friends who once played in a band while growing up together in small-town Wyoming. Two eventually moved away and two stayed in Oakpine. But when the friend who became a famous musician comes back home to die, the friends get together to play again.
I remember seeing Steve Allen on game shows in the 1970 and liking him, even as a teenager. He seemed to be to be a ‘gentleman’ and he seemed madly in love with his wife Jayne Meadows. 
An Inspector Ian Rutledge e-novella set in France in 1915. I suppose the Todds are thinking of mysteries for their character that are set during the war rather than after it, and the only way to write it is in flashbacks. 
Who hasn’t read Donaghue’s great novel-turned-movie 
Jennings is probably best known as the author of the series featuring Detective Murdoch, set in nineteenth century Toronto, Ontario. The books are the basis for the popular television series 
About four years ago, I read 
planters, bee notepads: anything you can name that could possibly have a bee on it, she had. After a few close friends took the bees they wanted (generally the ones that they had given her), I filled five cardboard boxes with bee paraphernalia.
“Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus tells the remarkable story of John Miller, one of America’s foremost migratory beekeepers, and the myriad and mysterious epidemics threatening American honeybee populations.”
3. 
First published in German in 1912, this series of adventures stars a young rebel bee who leaves the hive despite warnings to the contrary. She encounters good insects and bad, dangers and delights. The overarching theme of the book is a hit-you-over-the-head moral play: obey, work hard, be loyal. 
Although this is #5 in the Detective Joe Sandilands series, it is the first of the series that I have read. Writing about it now reminds me that I wanted to start at the beginning of the series but haven’t yet done so.
Kobo synopsis: “Josiah Reynolds, a former art history professor, was once a celebrity with wealth, social position, and a famous husband. Now all of that is gone. The professor finds her circumstances drastically altered. Retired, Josiah is now a full time beekeeper trying to stay financially afloat by selling honey at the local Farmers Market.”
This non-fiction work was my introduction to this icon of Canadian literature. 
I love this cover: it represents so well the Atlantic Canadian life I’ve embraced.
