Nonfiction Selections

Perhaps shamefully, given my profession, I long believed as many people do that nonfiction must either be a textbook or a biography.  I became professionally knowledgeable within those sections I was responsible for, but for a long while I was not particularly interested in exploring outside those sections.

Then I started to hear about titles, interesting titles, titles that I might actually enjoy reading.  The book reviews talked about “micro-histories” and “readable nonfiction,” with titles like Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s so Hard to Think about Animals by Hal Herzog, a book about the cultural and historical views people have held toward pets, wild and domesticated animals, and vermin; titles like that about the development and historical use of utensils for both cooking and eating: Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson.

Some further time after I started these forays into nonfiction, I learned about an interesting challenge: a librarian I knew set out to read at least one book from every ten Dewey numbers (she called them “Dewey Decades”).  If you’re not familiar with the Dewey Decimal System, it is a way of classifying and grouping books that have similar topics.  Based on its subject, every book is assigned a number, somewhere between 000 and 999.  Books about computer science and general information are between 000 and 099; 100 to 199 are for philosophy and psychology, and on and on: Religion (200s), Social Sciences (300s), Language (400s), Science (500s), Technology (600s), Arts and Recreation (700s), Literature (800s), and ending with History and Geography (900s).  If you perhaps aren’t a big reader, it may be enough to challenge yourself to read one or two books from every hundred.

Because I am a quick reader, I wanted more of a challenge: to read at least one book from every 10 Dewey numbers (000-009, 010-019… 680-689… 720-729…).  I admit that it’s a fairly relaxed challenge in that I don’t consider it necessary to go in order and fiction is still a considerable bulk of my reading.  Such small increments gives a better picture of the depth of what’s included in the collection: the 300s are Social Sciences, but 390-399 covers customs, etiquette, and folklore, including costume and personal appearance, customs of life cycle and domestic life, and death customs.  History and Geography is a huge section, but 950-959 is the history of Asia, through China, Japan, the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia and India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Without wading into the DDC (the Dewey Decimal Classifications, a 4-volume tome) and looking for numbers, I would have never read For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History (382) and learned about how the use of terraria changed gardening in England and cultivating tea in India, or Holy Sh*t!: A Brief History of Swearing (417), and learned how different architecture styles throughout history affected what we considered profane or vulgar.  One of my most recent nonfiction reads, Gulp by Mary Roach (612.3), covers much about the alimentary canal, from how saliva affects our perceptions of flavor to common methods for smuggling items into prisons and through customs.

 

While nonfiction does include cookbooks, biographies, car repair manuals, how-to books, and encyclopedias, it would be inaccurate to define it only by those types of titles.  In doing so, you would miss Just My Type: A Book about Fonts (686), The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers (364.1), and Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality (500), to name only a few.

by Sarah Morrison, 

Adult Services Librarian

published 6-15-13  in Moscow-Pullman Daily News