2022 has been the year no structure for my reading life. Due to that, I’ve read exactly 4 nonfiction books this year!
One of those was an amazing collection of illustrations all about the life of a book lover.
Seeing as it’s November and I’m still firmly in the realm of fall atmospheric reads with holiday romances on the horizon, I doubt I’ll be getting many more nonfiction books in.
But in past years I’ve been quite the nonfiction reader! I love learning new things through my nonfiction reading.
Some favorite topics include nutrition, health, self help, relationships, parenting, writing, and my guilty pleasure – celebrity memoirs!
When gathering information for this post, I was surprised and a little embarrassed to see how many celebrity memoirs I’ve read in the past 4 years. At least 24! There might be a future post about those one day.
It feels ironic to put together a list of nonfiction books during what is likely my lowest nonfiction reading year ever.
But I’m doing it in case any of you are embracing Nonfiction November – an initiative that encourages readers to read more nonfiction books this month than they normally would!
I wouldn’t want you to miss out on any of these past favorites.
Nonfiction Books Perfect for November:
The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi
This was my most recent nonfiction read and one of the few nonfiction books I’ve read this year. I listened to it on audio. Kendra Adachi narrates it herself which was really fun.
She also has a podcast! Though it isn’t one I listen to regularly.
When putting this list together, I noticed there’s a lot of podcast hosts featured. I’m not sure if that says I’m biased toward podcasters or if it’s just proof that podcasts have exploded so now everyone is doing one.
With her Lazy Genius method, Kendra Adachi introduces 13 principles to help you discover what it important to you so you can be a genius about those things and lazy about the rest. She wants to get rid of all the should do’s and should be’s so that we can truly live well focusing on what matters to each of us.
Kendra emphasizes that this will look different for everyone because we are all unique. It’s about cutting through the overwhelm to figure out what truly matters and skipping all the rest to be a fully functioning person.
I appreciate her honesty about her struggles to let go of perfection, her stress at having a surprise third child, and her advice for letting people in.
Some of my favorite principles are decide once, live in the season, and set house rules.
I want to check out her follow up book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen.
Slow: Simple Living for a Frantic World by Brooke McAlary
Another nonfiction read from earlier this year. I first came across Brooke McAlary via The Slow Your Home Podcast that she hosts with her husband. I’ve also previously read and enjoyed her first book, Destination Simple.
In Slow, Brooke McAlary shares her own journey of slowing down her fast paced life and gives a guideline for how to do it with your own.
I appreciated Brooke’s honesty and candor when it came to her personal struggles to finding balance and getting her life back on track after the chaos of having a young family. She has a strong desire to find meaning, something that I am constantly looking for as well.
There is a lot of good advice in this book for decluttering, de-owning, and finding what truly matters to you. The exercise that sticks out the most in my memory is writing your own obituary so you can use it as a compass guiding the way you really want to live.
How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books by Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer
I read this last September – a couple of weeks before my son was born. Wow, does that feel like a different lifetime now! This was a 5 star read for me! Here’s what I had to say.
I may be biased because I love the By the Book podcast co-hosted by Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer. So it’s not surprising that I enjoyed their book as well. In each episode of the podcast these ladies read one self help book and then live by it’s advice or instructions for two weeks. They report how things went, what they learned, and what was helpful or not to their lives.
In How to Be Fine, the authors take all those books and experiences they’ve shared and pull out the themes that seem to work best, the ones that don’t, and formulate their own set of self help guidelines. They also examine the field of self help, question some author’s motives, and share several personal stories and histories that haven’t made it into the podcast.
I listened to this on audio which felt like the perfect format since I love the podcast so much. They switch back and forth seamlessly narrating their writing. The book has the same tone as their podcast – smart, funny, and vulnerable. If anything I was just bummed it’s such a short book. The audio is only 5 hours long.
Beyond Labels: A Doctor and A Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite at a Time by Sina McCullough, PhD and Joel Salatin
This was my July book pick for my year of health experiment last year. It’s definitely one of my favorite finds. Beyond Labels is full of encouragement, clear information, and concise guidelines for making food choices that not only support your health but call for improvements of our broken food system.
Beyond Labels is co written by Sina McCullough, a doctor who healed her autoimmune disease through dietary changes over time and Joel Salatin, a regenerative farmer and head of the successful Polyface Farm in Virginia. The book explains various food labels and then seeks to go beyond that with discussion of food sources and ways to develop whatever food security means to the reader.
The format of the book flows like a discussion between the two of authors as they share information, insights, and tips for finding good food as well as preparing it. Both remain incredibly positive and hopeful in tone.
Beyond Labels begins with exercises to identify your personal roadmap to health, happiness, and freedom. The authors emphasize meeting yourself wherever you are on their food independence scale. Then making small changes over a long time to reach the right goal for yourself. For some that means choosing better foods from the grocery store. To others it means purchasing food from local farms. Wherever you are, they focus on being an informed consumer and taking on the responsibility for your own food choices.
The book contains 72 practical bites to get you started with small changes. I found all of these practical bites to be very useful, informative, and easy to understand.
Since reading this book last year, I’ve discovered they also have a podcast. It’s on my list to check out!
Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong – and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster
This might be the best book on pregnancy that I ever read.
When economist Emily Oster became pregnant and was handed the list of everything to avoid, she decided to look at the data behind these rules. She also examined studies surrounding prenatal testing and labor delivery options – all the decisions that come with pregnancy.
What Oster finds is that the data behind many accepted rules is often misguided. Some rules are just completely unproven. Expecting Better lays out study and research findings in an easy to understand way so that pregnant women or couples can use the data to make their own informed decisions.
I’m someone who appreciates having all the information and then forming my choice or opinion. This was absolutely the book for me. Oster is data driven while being reassuring and neutral in tone. Some things are clearly to do or not to do but where there’s a gray area as with many things in pregnancy, she’s all about making the informed choice that is right for you.
Oster has continued writing books about the data behind childrearing choices as her kids have gotten older! I have read part of her book, Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool, and look forward to checking out her newest book, The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, when Mr. O is older.
How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids by Jancee Dunn
We’re going all the way back to July 2020 with this one. I would like to reread this book soon actually. I’m curious how my thoughts and perspectives may have changed since actually becoming a parent. Here’s what I had to say back then.
Jancee Dunn’s How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids is hilarious as well as bravely honest. She bares her flaws and faults along with her husband’s for all her readers to see and learn from.
When her daughter turns six, Dunn realizes there has been a slow shift in the family roles since her daughter was born. Over time, Dunn has taken over most of the parenting and household managing roles while her husband lives a mostly carefree lifestyle and she’s becoming more angry and resentful of it. As a journalist she turns to research and then marital counseling to try to get their relationship and family back on track.
I took my time reading this book over the entire month. I was captivated by Dunn’s story and feel both more knowledgable and empowered by her findings.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
These last two nonfiction picks go all the way back to 2019. Though I wasn’t blogging that year, I noted them as favorites from my reading life then.
In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari covers the whole of human history from 100,000 years ago with 6 human species on earth to today when there’s only one. He takes readers through shifts of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions.
Sapiens explains how patterns of history have structured society, the animals and plants that exist today, and even our own minds. Harari explores how the constructs we take for granted came to be and what led to many of the beliefs common today. The book also ventures into where our species may be 1,000 years from now.
I listened to this one during a camping trip celebrating our anniversary. My husband actually listened to several sections with me. Hearing Harari’s imagined scenes of ancestors’ lives while laying under the stars contemplating our existence could not have been better matched.
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, the author of three books about exploring death practices, and founder of The Order of the Good Death. She first came on my radar when her book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory was recommended on Get Booked.
From Here to Eternity caught my attention first because of the travel aspect and my interest in other cultures.
In From Here to Eternity, Doughty travels around the globe studying how other cultures care for their dead. From sky burials to composting bodies, she dives into funeral customs all around the world and the ways the dead are treated with dignity. Her findings lead to even more questions about the American funeral industry and our own cultural fear of dead bodies.
I found the different customs fascinating and well as the different cultural views on mortality, bodies, and the afterlife. In our society this topic seems so taboo or else it’s shrouded in religious speech. All of those elements interest me as this topic is rarely discussed and yet it’s universal.
We’ve experienced a lot of loss in my family since I read originally read this book. While this isn’t a topic I can feel I can handle at the present, I would still like to read Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in the future.
Want more nonfiction recommendations?
- 2021 Year of Health Experiment
- 3 Lesser Known but Great Books about Nutrition
- My Favorite Books on Writing
- Self Improvement Book List
What areas of nonfiction do you gravitate toward?
