Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Nonfiction November - Book Pairings


Week Two's prompt is hosted by Sarah, of Sarah's Book Shelves:

It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.

This is the prompt that always proves tough for me and I often skip it. This year, I'm in!

My first pairing combines one of my favorite fiction reads of 2016, Jesmyn Ward's Salvage The Bones and Sheri Fink's nonfiction Five Days At Memorial, which I've been meaning to read for a long time. Both share Hurricane Katrina as a central event.


My second pairing is a pair of books set in India which both examine the lives of the poorest of that country's people, Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (one of my favorite books of 2010) and Katherine Boo's Behind The Beautiful Forevers (one of my favorite books of 2016).


My final pairing is two books that deal with the recovery of art in France following the Nazi occupation: Sarah Houghtelling's Pictures At An Exhibition and Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men. George Clooney thought Edsel's book was so interesting that he turned it into the 2014 movie of the same name.

What nonfiction pairings would you suggest?

3 comments:

  1. Love these pairings, Lisa, especially Behind the Beautiful Forevers and The Space Between Us. Umrigar's novel is waiting for me on the shelf in Florida... will read it this winter, for sure!

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  2. Great pairings! This one was really hard for me. Jesmyn Ward's The Mean We Reaped would be a good pairing with her Salvage the Bones.

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  3. I love this! Thank you for sharing, Lisa. I admit I didn't care for Salvage the Bones, but I really want to read Five Days At Memorial. And I loved The Space Between Us, so will have to check out Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

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