Monday, February 18, 2008

Non-Fiction Meme

Gautami at My Own Little Reading Room has come up with a non-fiction meme and tagged CJ at My Year of Reading Seriously, and CJ urged me to do this one. Without further ado:

a) What issues/topic interests you most--non-fiction, i.e, cooking, knitting, stitching, there are infinite topics that has nothing to do with novels?

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction and what little I do read still feels novelish (memoir, autobiography, biography). I am interested in lots of different topics, but I usually just search the web. My coworkers joke around that all they have to do is express a little interest in a topic and a few minutes later I will come back to give them a full report of the topic. What can I say, I’m curious. But not curious enough to read a whole book—not now anyway.

However, I do own and have read a lot of non-fiction/essay books dealing with writing, teaching, and other literature/history related topics. One of the most interesting books I had to read for grad school was Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Early Speech in Early New England (link to amazon).

b) Would you like to review books concerning those topics?

Except for the odd memoir or biography that I’ve read since blogging, all the reviewing I’ve done has been for school.

c) Would you like to be paid or do it as interest or hobby?

What? Get paid? As far as I understand, if you get your review published in academia, it isn’t a paid thing but more of a CV thing…

d) Would you recommend those to your friends and how?

I am guessing that the books referred to above that I own are only interesting to those interested in teaching, writing, literature theory (e.g. Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, etc), and the history of literature/language/etc in general. And most of the writing books are based on theory (for teaching writing) or technical writing rather than fiction writing. Readers of my blog: believe it or not, I do know how to write decently. I tend to get a little lazy, though, when blogging. Ha ha!

e) If you have already done something like this, link it to your post.

I only have paper reviews written for school (well, they are saved on my computer but not in blog posts).

f) Please don’t forget to link back here or whoever tags you.

CJ urged me to do this, but I wasn’t officially tagged—so, I’m not officially tagging anyone. Easy as pie!

5 comments:

CJ said...

Okay, next time I start from the bottom so that you're included!

Thanks for doing this and I found your answers very interesting. I looked at that book and it looks very interesting. In fact, I've added it to my wish list.

cjh

Trish @ Love, Laughter, Insanity said...

CJ - Oh no! I'm not complaining about being tagged. It's a lot less pressure to do the meme, which makes it more pleasant to complete (I think). So, keep on the way you're goin! :)

I took an early American Lit class my last semester of school and found it fascinating. I don't particularly care for early American lit (at least before say Washington Irving), but the history is amazing. So, the book discusses a lot of history about the Puritans, the Antinomians, Anne Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, Salem Witch Trials, etc. Kamensky's writing is fairly accessible, which isn't always the case for academic writers.

Literary Feline said...

I do that too! Someone will ask a question that no one has an answer to and I come back with an answer that I found on the internet. They think I know everything. :-)

heather (errantdreams) said...

My coworkers joke around that all they have to do is express a little interest in a topic and a few minutes later I will come back to give them a full report of the topic.

I'm like this, but with books. When I started gardening I bought gardening books; when I worked to switch to whole grains I bought whole grain baking books; etc.

Trish @ Love, Laughter, Insanity said...

*Literary Feline - my coworkers see right through my knowledge :) I can't pretend to know everything, although sometimes I'd like to!

*Heather - I haven't done this as much with books because I never know WHICH books to get, but I'm constantly looking for information on random topics of interesting. Last week it was quiltiing. :)