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!
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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.
