The 2022 Nonfiction Challenge Returns! Prizewinners/Nominees in January

Welcome to one and all, new members and old fans.

This is a place where fans of non-fiction reading can prod themselves into reading books from their TBR stacks, discover new titles, find an incentive to venture into fresh territory. What makes non-fiction such a fun area to explore is that it ranges from humor (Bill Bryson, anyone?) to the most serious tomes about climate science. You can read a popular memoir (think, Just Kids) or an arcane book on a topic that intrigues or engages you.

These monthly challenges are simply a starting point, and I hope that you'll also flag other books that you're reading that you think might appeal to non-fiction aficionados! Each month has a theme: some are general in nature (a historical era, a geographic region), others focus on a category of non-fiction (history, nature, etc.) I take any/all suggestions seriously, so if you've got an idea for a new category for 2023, just let me know!

For the fifth straight year in a row, we will kick 2022 exploring books that have been nominated for or won some kind of literary award or distinction. This could have happened in any year, and the book(s) you choose could have been on a shortlist or longlist. The award can be based in any country, and include books written in any language. The only conditions are that it be a work of non-fiction published in book form (so, no non-fiction magazine articles that won Pulitzers; no novels) and that it have been listed as being nominated for or winning an award. (In other words, those long lists of "best books of 2021/2020/2019" that newspapers publish don't count: there's no jury process determining eventual "winners" in these roundups.)

I'll add a post with some suggestions of where to look; feel free to add links to other challenges you may be aware of.

Happy New Year, and happy reading!

Planning your 2022 nonfiction reading...

Here's a list of all the year's upcoming challenges, to help you think about what you might want to read, place inter-library loan requests, etc. etc.

February – *Welcome to the Anthropocene -- anything about the transformation of the world into a place dominated by humankind, with related threats to other species, to the climate, to resources

March – *Espionage (and Counter-Espionage) -- I thought this would be fun; I found myself reading a lot of non-fiction on this topic in 2021.

April – Armchair Traveling (in time or space) -- travel, but with an emphasis on places you've never been, or that takes place in an era that you didn't experience (eg historical travel, or people following in the footsteps of great historical travelers like Ibn Battuta.) A twist on a classic category

May – *From Wars to Peace -- Someone had suggested a challenge about wars. I'm tweaking it slightly, so that you can read about the lead-up to wars (the causes), the conflict itself (in any respect) and the aftermath, as people try to recover or move past the war. (Thinking of books like Margaret Macmillan's magisterial tome on the Versailles peace talks of 1919 here, as an example.)

June – Science & Medicine -- Gene splicing? Covid vaccines? Pandemics and healthcare system challenges? New surgical techniques??

July – *Cross-Genres -- Sometimes the most fascinating books are those that cross genres. For instance, a true crime book that involves the theft of an ancient manuscript. Or a travel book that's also about music or theater (I'm thinking of Bernard Levin's hilarious tour of opera/music festivals). Or a biography that is as much about history as it is the person being profiled. Or someone who is writing about gardening, but when the book itself ends up as a memoir. You know these when you see 'em...

August – Books By Journalists -- A returning fave

September – Biography -- but NOT memoir this time! (*grin*)

October – *From the 'Middle Ages' to the Renaissance. Yes, I know this is a largely European construct, but it also can involve stories of first contacts as Europeans set off to see what was along the coast of Africa or in the 'New World' in this time frame. Let's put this roughly from 1300 CE to 1600 CE? The earliest parts of the Renaissance (other than the Carolingian Renaissance, of course) were visible by 1300, but it was still the 'Middle Ages'. Open to books that explore ideas that would be developed in this time frame but that start earlier. For instance, Marco Polo's travels took him to China and he and others (including Crusaders) were bringing back new ideas and things that had traveled across the Silk Road, such as paper, which then would permit the creation of a hallmark of the new era, the printing press...

November – Books About Books -- a logical followup from a time-frame focused challenge that includes the birth of the printing press!

December – As You Like It -- Look at the year's best lists; wrap up something you've been wanting to finish; seek out something that defies description/categorization.

*New categories for 2022!

U.S. National Book Awards

Baillie Gifford Prize, formerly Samuel Johnson Prize
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and An Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn; The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre; Negroland by Margo Jefferson

Pulitzer Prizes -- general nonfiction
Random titles: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen; Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award

Wellcome Book Prize -- mixed fiction/nonfiction

The Orwell Prize -- 2017 longlist -- includes some fiction
Recent nominees include What You Did Not Tell by Mark Mazower and Islamic Enlightenment by Christophe de Bellaigue

Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence
Educated by Tara Westover; The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú, The Poisoned City by Anna Clark (about Flint, Mich.), The Feather Thief by Kirk Johnson Wallace, Dopesick by Beth Macy

Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards
(Where the Wild Winds Are by Nick Hunt; also Border by Kapka Kassabova. The Epic City, about Calcutta, by Kushanava Choudhury.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize
There's a great biography category here.

Los Angeles Times book prizes -- any non-fiction category
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Royal Society prize
https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/book-prizes/science-book-prize/20....
Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine

And there's a bio category for the Costa prize (used to be Whitbread).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Book_Awards
In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott; H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald; Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

the Wainwright Prize
Books (with a focus on England) about nature, the outdoors, and English-focused travel.
The Seabird's Cry by Adam Nicolson

The J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project
The Nieman School at Harvard and the Columbia Journalism School award two book prizes each year to published works and one to works in progress.

The Frederick Douglass Prize
Awarded to books writing about the themes of slavery, abolition, resistance, etc.

The Phi Beta Kappa Society Awards
Rather academic in nature; includes books like Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder or Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan (winners of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, one of the categories). Siddhartha Mukherjee won their science award for his book on the gene; there's also an award for literary criticism.

The Hawthornden Prize
The majority of books here are fiction, but occasionally a work of non-fiction creeps through, such as Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor.

The Chatauqua Prize
NOTE: The nominees include both fiction and non-fiction, so do your due diligence!! The prize goes to "a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts."
(examples, Why Read Moby Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick; In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King, It's What I Do by Lynsey Addorio.)

Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
Awarded to a top work of non-fiction by a Canadian author -- All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay, a memoir, by a great Canadian novelist. Nominees in recent past include Mad Enchantment by Ross King, about Monet and his water lily paintings, Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga, an indigenous writer, about racism; Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman, A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell and a book about the Arctic by novelist Kathleen Winter, Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage.

The Wolfson History Prize
Shortlisted for 2021 for this award was one of my fave books of the year, Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden. The book that won was Black Spartacus, a bio of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Previous years have included books about birds, about China, about medicine. Mary Beard's book about Pompeii was a winner/nominee.

The Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year
Formerly the Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Titles like Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg; McMafia by Misha Glenny, Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin and More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby.

My own candidates for this month are:

Ravenna, Capital of Europe by Judith Herrin (Wolfson nominee 2021)
I started reading this in 2021, but haven't finished

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Pulitzer bio nominee 2006)
I have been meaning to read this for a long time, and Didion's death has bumped it to the top of my list.

Along the Amber Route by C.J. Schuler (Stanford Travel Award nominee 2021)
A new to me author/title, and an example of serendipity when looking at lists of rewards. I'm intrigued by the region and the concept.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich by Harald Jahner (shortlist, Baillie Gifford Prize 2021)
A topic that interests me -- the aftermath of wars in general.

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (LA Times book award, 2020)
on my TBR of shame

English Pastoral by James Rebanks (several prizes, incl. the Wainwright: 2021)
I'll read this if I can get it from the Providence Athenaeum in time (it's on loan until Jan 11).

One final note: I know that while there are a core of dedicated readers participating here, we don't tend to be as chatty as some of the other threads. So it's tough to reach 150 posts.

That being the case: please bear in mind that while I always will give a link to the next month's challenge once I create it, if it's not an automatic link (eg at 150 posts), YOU WILL NEED TO STAR THE NEXT MONTH'S CHALLENGE YOURSELF. If you star this thread, but we don't hit 150 posts, then you will need to slap a star on the February challenge (assuming you don't want to lose it!!)

Thank you Suzanne for setting up this year's challenge!

I'm going to read Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane which won the Wainwright Prize in 2019.

I have a couple I hope to get to in January. I need to read A Chosen Exile by Allyson Hobbs for an early February book club. I'm also going to try to fit in Inheritance by Dani Shapiro.

I’ve posted about this on the Message Board and added the link to the group wiki.

Also looking for a selection to join in!

>6 Jackie_K: I loved that book, Jackie...

>7 cbl_tn: And I loved Dani Shapiro's book, too!!

>8 drneutron: This is one of the best months to join in, as there are so many candidates out there in so many genres. The Wellcome Prize is on hiatus, alas, but I'm always excited by taking a look back over the previous year to see what books I have on my TBR list that will fit here.

And thanks for adding it to the wiki!!

>1 Chatterbox: thank you for setting up the non-fiction challenge for 2022.

I love printing out this list and setting up the books for a whole year!

Questions:

1. Is there a Wild Card?

2. Can the date for October with the question mark = 1600 (?) extend to 1619?

If not, I'll save The 1619 Project for December.

Thank you for continuing this.

I think I'll be reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe for this one. Also maybe Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt. And I'm tempted by Inheritance.

Thanks for coordinating this again, Suzanne. Fun new categories!

I no longer follow any prizes, so I'll have a look through my shelves to see what will qualify for this month's topic. I haven't read nonfiction for the last couple of years, so I'm excited to catch up and also read some books already on my own shelves.

I will read Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End. It won the Costa in 2008.

I cannot promise to make it every month, Suz, but I'll try to participate more often than not.

I pulled Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests off the shelf for my prizewinner. It won the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History and the 2018 Donald Smiley Prize.

I am going to read Unwarrented: Policing Without Permission by Barry Friedman. It won the 2018 Silver Gavel Award. This award is given annually by the American Bar Association for outstanding work that helps to improve comprehension of jurisprudence in the United States. I have been reading one of these winners each year for several years now and have generally found these books to be of great help in increasing my understanding of how our laws work. Or don't work - as the case may be.

If I get time I am going to try to read Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear. This book was an Economist Best Book back in 2007 and I am very interested in the life that Potter lead and in her very generous gift to the people of Britian. However, Unwarrented is 500 pages and I might not have time to read both books.

>15 Familyhistorian: Wow, I didn't know that Jack Saywell had a prize named in his honor?!! That's great, and the book sounds fabulous and timely. He was a guest lecturer to a course I took at Queen's about the comparative history of the US and Canada (think: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness vs POGG (peace, order and good government, in the respective foundational documents...) That was one of my more memorable courses; I ended up writing a paper about the Gouzenko affair and how differently the US and Canada responded to the revelations and to protecting national security in the 1945-1950 time period. It's interesting -- each year at university, there was one paper that I still remember working on, on a topic that still kinds of fascinates me. In my first year, for my intellectual history foundational course, I wrote about how Charles Kingsley and Julian Huxley developed very different social/political responses to Darwin's theories about evolution; in my third year, I wrote about the nationalities question in the then-Soviet Union (STILL a hot potato issue -- see Ukraine/Russia today...) And in my final year, my thesis on Japanese defense policy.

>12 AnneDC: Empire of Pain is an excellent book, very detailed and very damning. I found the first few chapters a bit of a slog, but important info whose significance becomes apparent later on.

>11 m.belljackson: Hmm, I hadn't really thought of a wild card. I suppose I see December's challenge as the equivalent of that.

I think by 1619, the world was really the early modern world, more than a century past first contacts. Really, I'm thinking about the period spanning the time frame of 'losing' ancient knowledge (so, starting in the early Middle Ages, maybe Charlemagne or earlier) and ending up with the Renaissance, which filtered slowly northward.

The 1619 project might fit into July, as a cross-genre book? It's a work of history, but also sociology, biography, political criticism, etc. etc. I could certainly make a case for that. Also, while I usually say "works of journalism don't count", Nikole Hannah Jones won the commentary Pulitzer in 2020 for the essay that serves as the foundation of the book, so I'd be prepared to say that also qualifies as an exception. The Pulitzer was awarded for essentially the same argument/material, even if it was in a non-book category this time.

(But still "no" to anyone arguing in favor of "best of" lists -- the idea is to look for juried awards. Same goes for Goodreads awards, which are determined by popular votes.)

>18 Chatterbox:
Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear also won the Lakeland Award in 2007. The Lakeland Award is given to a book set in or featuring Cumbria. I checked and Cumbria is a region/county in England. Some people also call parts of the region the Lake District. I know that the Lakeland Award is not well known, but I don't know that much about the region so will probably read this book anyway - at some point.

I will be reading The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson - if it gets here in time. I ordered it last week, so I am at the mercy of the bookseller and the post office at this point.

What about West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915?

It won a Library of Congress Children's Literature Center Best Children's Book Award and CSCBC Children's Book of the Year.

>18 Chatterbox: A Wild Card would work for those of us who find both "War" and "Espionage" too much to deal with in one year.

And, does "Specsavers" qualify as a book award reference?

Taking you up on Bill Bryson and will read At Home.

>23 kac522: - I would, too, except I read it a few years ago. I read it via audiobook because he narrates and I love listening to him read his books to me. I love Bryson!

I may pass on January for this challenge because I am determined not to break my promise so early in the year about reading off my own shelves and I can't find anything suitable that's a prize-winner (ie, NF) on my shelves at the moment. But I will be lurking!

>24 jessibud2: Right, I know what you mean! I am trying to read off my shelves, too, but I had to get this from the library, as I don't have any NF prize-winners, either. And since it fits another challenge, I decided to break down and borrow it. I have some older NF books that are classics, but before "prizes" were awarded.

>21 fuzzi: Yes! Go for it...

>22 m.belljackson: Sorry about the doom and gloom! I must unconsciously have been affected by pandemicitis. Still, espionage can be lots of fun to read about. You could read John LeCarre's The Pigeon Tunnel for that one, which is entertaining, with lots of short pieces.

That said -- kudos for finding the Specsavers book awards (presented with Foyles). It's juried, so it absolutely qualifies.

>19 benitastrnad: It doesn't matter how little known or regional a book prize is -- as long as it's a juried prize and it's a non-fiction title on the longlist, shortlist, etc., you are good to go!

I've started reading Along the Amber Route, which I'm finding fascinating and is reigniting a bit of travel lust focusing on Finland and Estonia (go figure...)

>26 Chatterbox: Great - I'll start I AM MALALA today and search my shelves for Espionage by another name.

I've already got Torn Lilacs and a book of Anti War quotes lined up for War.

>18 Chatterbox: How interesting that you know the person the prize is named after. It makes it more meaningful when you know what the person was about and how it links with the prize. The comparative course looking at US and Canadian history sounds fascinating - such different governing ideologies living side by side. But of course they'd have to be to stop one from gobbling up the other.

I have read Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill, which won the Costa Book Award in around 2008.

Pleased with my pick too.

I have a zillion books going, but decided to listen to Mendelsohn's An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic because I've put it off too long.

I am reading American Canopy, which won the Association of American Publishers’ 2012 PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Award for U.S. History.

>31 karspeak:
American Canopy is an excellent book! I read it a couple of years ago and it made my personal Best of the Year list. It was packed full of great history from a very different perspective.

>30 ffortsa:
That book (Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn is one I have had on my TBR list since it was published. I should read it too - but not this month. :-)

>32 benitastrnad: That’s good to hear!

>33 benitastrnad: So far, the audio is excellent.

I started This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends for this challenge. So far it is quite interesting.

I was at this discussion/presentation about Mendelsohn's book at the Providence Athenaeum; anyone who is reading it might find the audio version of this "salon" interesting. No paywall.

https://providenceathenaeum.org/media-archives/an-odyssey-a-father-a-son-and-an-...

A quick one: Going into Town by Roz Chast; 2017 New York City Book award. This graphic book is a guide to New York City like no other--in her very funny way, Chast combines cartoons, drawings, hand-written text, maps, photos and how-tos to help anyone who plans on "Going into Town." A lot of fun and informative, too, with a little history, memoir and city-fied "bewares." You can't miss her love for NY.

Just found out one of my first of the year won the 2021 Michigan Notable Books award. So The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch counts!

>39 drneutron: Just wanted to congratulate you and your team for the splendid deployment of our new infrared telescope. Amazing!

>40 ffortsa: Thanks! I had very little do with it, but am astonished at how well all that complex engineering worked. Some really smart people worked really hard, and it's paid off.

I finished Robert Macfarlane's wonderful book Underland: A Deep Time Journey and it is my first 5* book of the year, and also (believe it or not) the first audiobook I've ever listened to! I listened to it whilst reading the ebook as well, and that turned out to be a fantastically immersive experience, once I got used to it. And it's a great book to be so immersed, dealing as it does with the land below the surface - caves, underground bunkers, sinkholes, glacier moulins, nuclear burial sites, as well as forest understorey and root systems, and city underground worlds such as the Paris catacombs.

I have to admit to being a total scaredy cat when it comes to being under ground or water, there's no way in a million years you'd get me caving or visiting pretty much any of the places he goes (apart from the forest, I could cope with that!), but his writing is so vivid and visceral that I kind of feel like I was there anyway. His writing does divide opinion - some people think his prose is particularly purple, but I honestly think there wasn't a word out of place here, and this book is a step up (in terms of depth and ambition and impact) from his previous books (which I also loved). This book deservedly won the Wainwright Prize a couple of years ago. 5/5.

I had to look up "purple prose" a new concept for me. Here's what I found.

" Purple prose is overly embellished language that serves little meaningful purpose in a piece.It's characterized by strings of multisyllabic words, run-on sentences, and blocks of unyielding text. Universally discouraged by all manner of writing experts, purple prose slows the pace, muddles the content, and can lose the reader entirely."

>42 Jackie_K: Your book bullet has scored!

I finished Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro. When an author who writes memoirs learns through a DNA test that her father is not the man she grew up with, of course the search for the truth is going to become a memoir. The search for the fertility clinic sperm donor was only part of the story, though. In the process of searching for her biological father, she also learned more about the father who raised her.

This was the right book at the right time for me. I've been thinking about my father a lot since I'd be helping him celebrate his birthday next week if he were still alive.

>45 cbl_tn: I found that one an interesting look at how children inherit their traits and philosophies.

I finished An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic last night.

review: A few years ago, my read-aloud group read through Fagle's Odyssey, and it made me curious about this title. Mendelsohn is teaching a seminar on The Odyssey, and his elderly father asks to sit in, to refresh his memory from his high school days. For the reader, this becomes a dual text: fascinating notes about the Odyssey itself, and a wonderful meditation on fathers and sons, particularly this father and son, so different from each other. As the ancient story moves forward, the son reflects on his father's reactions as well as his own, and his students' responses, and the search for the father parallels in many ways Odysseus's journey home. Bronson Pinchot read the audiobook I listened to, and I loved every minute of it.

>47 ffortsa: The author of the book I read (Inheritance by Dani Shapiro) mentions Mendelsohn in her book as a personal friend. She's not name-dropping. Mendelsohn's journalist sister is into genealogy and she helped Shapiro from the earliest stages of her search for her birth father.

I'm reading The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers by Michael Leahy, which won the 2016 Casey Award for "Best Baseball Book of the Year."

I finished This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends today. This book turned out to be a huge disappointment. The author is sloppy with actual facts and tends to generalize a lot. Given that she herself admits this book is written for laymen, a reader can easily jump to invalid conclusions. Cybersecurity is a complex matter which is often not discussed in public. The author was able to get access to a lot of good sources of information but she lost the opportunity to educate the reader on the topic.

I just started Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment which won last year's Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. I'm definitely going to like it.

Hi, I'm new to this challenge, so I hope I'm not overstepping by adding a few books that may not fit the challenge:

1) The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko which is the chronicling of the egregious errors of a county coroner and a dentist who claims to be a dental pathologist. (which at that time there was no such thing--there was no technology for analzying bite marks--this man convicted a person from a bite mark that was actually an animal bite) Very shoddy and suspicious work that incarcerated many innocent victims in Mississippi in the 1950's-1970's. Balko is an American journalist and blogger who showcased two specific cases of two murdered African-American girls and the men who were incarcerated for these crimes. I wish the author had focused a bit more as he meanders into many other cases, even to the Emmett Till case. This book won the Innocence Project Award for 2015. The forward is by John Grisham.

2) West From Home by Laura Ingalls Wilder tells the story of Laura's visit to her daughter's home in San Francisco in 1915. A very good description of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. This book won the Library of Congress Children's Literature Center Best Children's Book Award and CSCBC Children's Book of the Year. I can't imagine this being a children's book!

>52 Tess_W: I read West From Home, and the host approved it for the challenge. :)

>52 Tess_W:
I had the pleasure of seeing Radley Balko talk about this book at Parnassus Book Store in Nashville, TN. That bookstore is owned by Ann Patchett. He and the co-author of the book gave an author talk that was well attended. They were very entertaining and enlightening and what they had to say was shocking for many people in the audience, when it shouldn't have been. I read it a couple of years ago and thought it was well done in that it exposed the problems with the state coroners office in Mississippi.

>54 benitastrnad: How interesting. Did you read the book?

>53 fuzzi: Yeah!

>55 Tess_W:
yes. I read it back in 2020 for one of these nonfiction group topics. I am not sure which one. It had special resonance since I live in Alabama and know how pervasive the "Good 'Ole Boys" system is.

I finished American Canopy, which would also have worked for next month's anthropocene theme. It looks at American (US) history through the lens of its trees. This could have been gimmicky, but the author made a very strong case that America's vast forests played a huge and vital role in its geographical, cultural, and economic growth. I was already familiar with some of the episodes highlighted in the book, such as the chestnut blight, and Aldo Leopold's role in protecting wilderness. But the broader historical context was very helpful, particularly in understanding the importance of wood for various industries and products through the 1950's. However, it was also heartbreaking to read about the deforestation of America's vast, old growth forests, from New England to Florida, and from the East Coast to the West Coast. I had to force myself to keep reading at times.

>57 karspeak:
I read that book for this challenge a couple of years ago and it made my personal best-of-the-year reads. Very interesting take on American history.

>42 Jackie_K: I just finished Underland: A Deep Time Journey (in Dutch translation).
Completele agree, it was my first 5* read in 2022 too!

I am not going to finish Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission tonight, so as soon as I finish it I will post it here. So far it has been a very interesting read with the author telling we, the voters, that we aren't doing our job and we will pay for it in the future if we don't correct that.

I'm still hoping to wrap up Along the Amber Route tonight! I'll be posting the challenge for February later tonight, as well...

I had a good month for nonfiction, but didn't get to some of my planned reads (they required a trip to the library, rendered difficult by all kinds of factors, culminating in a positive covid test.)

>59 FAMeulstee: It's great, isn't it? I wonder what he'll do next? (I know he's spending a lot of time on the Lost Words/Spell Songs project at the moment, but I mean I wonder what his next really hefty book project will be).

>62 Jackie_K: We are way behind, Mountains of the Mind was just published in Dutch translation, and Landmarks isn't translated yet. All I hope is that his next book will be translated sooner.

My prize winning read for the month was Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. In essence it was an historical account but its focus was the political aspect of the country’s and the people’s history taking into account what the author considers the nations included in the development of the country. He called these the three pillars: the English, the French and the Aboriginal.

It was a sometimes dry, sometimes fascinating look at the history that brought it close to the present day.

>64 Familyhistorian: And your book bullet scores a hit on me ...

February thread is here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/339247

>65 ArlieS: Hope you enjoy it!