Week #8 and we're learning about Readers Advisory for Non-fiction. Of the many genres that non-fiction has to offer, I choose travel, memoir, crime, and essays as my four (4) to blog about.

Genre__________Dewey no                    Title___________Author________
Travel tales           910                        No Touch Monkey!          Halliday, Ayun
Essays                   varies                     Best American Science    Ariely, Dan
                                                               & Nature Writing
Memoir                 Biography              Kabul Beauty School       Rodriguez, Deborah
Crime                    364                         True Story                        Finkel, Michael





One title I selected is Michael Finkel's True Story:Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa.This narrative non-fiction title reads like a novel. It's a gripping story filled with lies and deceipt. It really is two stories - two parts of Michael's life that sort of collide. He, a respected NY Times magazine reporter, is in the process of losing his career and reputation when he finds he's a victim of identity theft. He's fired from his job and simultaneously is informed that another man, on the run and accused of murdering his whole family, has assumed his identity. What a great set up for a novel - or a made for TV movie - but it's true! I believe some of the appeal of this book, to a fiction reader, would be plot, characters, tone & pacing. Michael Finkel, an investigative journalist can tell a good story, set the scene, and create suspense.

True crime books like this appeal to the mystery, suspense, and thrillers audience.


The book I selected to represent the memoir/biography genre is Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez. This memoir tells the tale of her time spent in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. She went to offer humanitarian aid and wound up befriending many Afghans. Others in her group had background as doctors, nurses, etc. and she had been a hairdresser. It turned out that her profession & work experience was very useful, after all. She helped the women to set up some small businesses - against great opposition due to the cultural mores and the traditional closed life of women in that country. Her wonderful heartfelt stories of the women she met and the culture they lived in would be suitable for fiction readers who enjoy multi-cultural fiction. The characters are so well drawn that the reader feels as if they knew them.