No non-fiction. That is the 1st Rule of Book Club, not what you’re thinking.  I waffled on this one when Curt first brought up the matter of our unwritten constitution, because, being a lover of history, politics and contemporary affairs, it seemed like we were shortening ourselves by instituting arbitrary limits on our reading.  Then there are books like Jostein Gaarder’s “Sophie’s World” which is a non-fiction book dressed up as a children’s novel – how do you classify something like that, discuss it, analyze it?  Given the size of the door-stopping paperweights I have in my library at home though (“India at a Glance” in 2000 pages, e.g.), I have conceded the Hippie’s point.  There’s enough richness in the fictionalized universe for us not to get into the inevitable whiff of “homework” that taking apart a factual tome would entail. It’s still something I wish we could get past, however.

The category of “Other Book Reviews” in this site allows me to sidle around the restriction, and post up for consideration many of the great books I have read in the last ten years (and for the Hippie to post his review of the “People’s History of the US” he has been warbling about for so long).  And you can bet that others will follow without question.

The thing is, literature allows us to discover the inner mind of man.  Whether it is the spare prose of Hemmingway or the more descriptive victorian novels of Dickens or the pastoralists, or even First Works like “Beowulf”, “Moll Flanders,” “The Illiad,” “The Ramayana” and “The Tale of Genji”, all fiction to some extent delves into the human condition. Non fiction is the diametrical opposite, for, while Fiction discusses the state of man, Non-fiction analyzes the actual Doings of Man (or a man, in the case of a bio). And that in its own way is a fascinating matter not least because for the most part, non-fiction rests on recorded fact plus some interpretation and bias of the author (non-fiction can therefore be as mercilessly debated for its interpretation as our current literary works are).

Too, I believe that in our modern, fast-moving, always-connected world of mass entertainment, news and information flow, we are losing sight of the past, or not appreciating trends until they are upon or past us, and we see them only in hindsight. Good non-fiction can illustrate and throw into relief matters current and past and future in a way a novel cannot always accomplish. If reading lots of books (as Stephen King advocates in his excellent book “On Writing”) improves your appreciation of books and your own writing, then should not the same apply to one’s appreciation of the world we actually live in and the events that have shaped it?

For example: the ascent of computers, the rise of the social networks, Google, cloud computing, convergence of hardware, have all ben discussed in various non-fiction works in my library and shed light onto modern technological culture and our place within it.Yergin’s “The Prize” remains the book to read about oil and Hydrocarbon Man. Nial Ferguson’s works on empire and money speak to both past and present both on an economic and political front. Robert Fisk’s magisterial magnum opus “The Great War for Civilization” tackles thorny issues of coexistence and hate. And how often does one read books as fascinating and enthralling as Kissinger’s “Diplomacy” or Halberstam’s “The Fifties”?

It is to those of us who have an interest in reading books both large and small, about past and present, based on fact or conjecture, that the reviews of non-fiction titles in this section are aimed.