A Genre I Wish Were More Popular

This week, Long & Short Reviews asks if there's a genre of books reviewers wish were more popular.

I like literary nonfiction. I mind bitterly that most public libraries have purged it from their shelves. I'd like to see more of it, just because, when people have written both novels and collections of essays (or even book-length deep dives into a single subject), I almost always like their nonfiction books best.

Arguably blogs meet our "need" to read each other's personal essays. I'd argue "nay." Blogs are interesting but, as someone said around the time the brand known as Priscilla King was born, the word "blog" sounds like a glob of dough and that's how blogs read. Blog posts are things that, if our friends show enough interest in our writing on the topic, could be made good enough to be printed in creative nonfiction books. 

That's about all I have to say on the subject, this being a busy week, but here's a quick list of nonfiction books I like, as suggested by what's on my shelves in the office today:

1. Knitting Around by Elizabeth Zimmermann

In the 1970s Elizabeth Zimmermann was probably the best known knitter on Earth. Having written the how-to-knit and how-to-knit-current-fashions books most people still like best, she'd been asked to do TV shows about knitting. People respected her not saying much about the rest of her life, but they wished for a memoir of her early life in England and immigration during the War. So she wrote one. The book alternates between chatty discussions of knitwear she'd designed, with variations, and her autobiography in short, pithy stories. She also did drawings and paintings; there's a centerfold showing those.

2. The Bachelor Home Companion by P.J. O'Rourke

Only slightly exaggerated discussions of the way many of our generation lived when we were young and single. 

3. The Dog with the Chip in His Neck by Andrei Codrescu

Some of his short funny essays for NPR, some of his longer but still witty literary studies as required by his teaching job, bring the 1980s back to life. 

4. Lighten Up by Ken Davis

Christian preacher tells funny stories about his life and observations.

5. Dakota by Kathleen Norris

First of the trilogy of literary nonfiction she wrote while all but moving into the monastery near the hospital where her husband was treated for cancer. He was not a Christian. She wasn't sure she believed that Christianity was true, but she found herself both practicing and preaching the faith anyway. In this book she's still close to her earlier life in the New York publishing world and reflects on the poems she wrote in a successful poetry collection, on her students' concerns, on her roots in South Dakota and her life there. 

6. Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

He studied timber wolves up close and personal. He even tried eating mice.

7. The Language Imperative by Suzette Haden Elgin

One of her more abstruse linguistic books, but Elgin was constitutionally incapable of being abstruse. She surveyed people who speak more than one language and wrote about what they'd reported about the way they spoke. It's actually a fun read, at least if linguistics interests you.

8. The Skeptical Feminist by Barbara Walker

She was even more of a polymath than Elizabeth Zimmermann. She wrote about folklore and rocks and what seemed like all the knitting patterns on Earth, and she wrote about the life experiences that pushed her away from Christianity. Quite well.

9. The Dog Who Wooed at the World by Laura Lee Cascada

Cascada and about a hundred of her e-friends reflect on our encounters with different kinds of animals... from manatees to beetles, with of course a lot of dog and cat stories. My freaky-looking cat Mogwai is about the middle of the book.

10. Grazing Along the Crooked Road by Betty Skeens

I suppose, if I were imposing Dewey Decimal classification on my books, I'd call this one a cookbook but it's also history, memoir, art, photography, and above all a great gorgeous guide for tourists from the early 2000s. Several of the places and people featured in the book are still around.