A Non-Fiction Adventure

A little while ago I read about a new reading project: A Non-Fiction Adventure.

At first I thought I would be mad to take on another reading project, but when I thought a little more I decided that it was something I really should do.

Because I used to read a lot of non-fiction, but over the last few years I have read next to nothing. It isn’t that I haven’t found books that I’ve wanted to read – I’ve found lots – but I haven’t picked them up.

So I need a push, to make me re-balance my reading, and this is it.

Here’s how it works:

Inspired by Jillian’s Classic Club, Michelle of The True Book Addict has put together a spin-off for non-fiction novels, A Non-Fiction Adventure.

These are the guidelines:

• Choose 50+ non-fiction books; the number is up to you. Choose 50, 75, 100, 200. It’s entirely your choice.
• Books must be non-fiction–biography, autobiography, history, memoir, cooking, travel, science, etc.
•  List them at your blog (or on Goodreads or another social media site, if you do not have a blog)
•  Choose your completion goal date five years in the future…

I’m listing fifty books. I’ve kept the number low because, I hope, many of these books will lead me to other books. And because who knows what might happen over the next five years.

Here’s the list:

Interesting Women & Their Lives

• A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, her daughter Amy, and Edward Burne-Jones by Josceline Dimbleby
•  Becoming Queen by Kate Williams
•  Born to Rule: Granddaughters of Victoria, Queens of Europe by Julia Gelardi
•  England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton by Kate Williams
•  Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter by Lucinda Hawksley
•  Love Among the Butterflies: Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady by Margaret Fountaine
• Period Piece by Gwen Raverat
•  Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life by Sofka Zinovieff
•  The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey by Leanda de Lisle
•  Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match by Wendy Moore

Houses, Homes & Domesticity

• Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery
•  Four Hedges by Clare Leighton
•  We Bought an Island by Evelyn E Atkins
•  Madresfield: One house, one family, one thousand years by Jane Mulvagh
•  The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes
•  If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley
•  Other People’s Daughters: The Life And Times Of The Governess by Ruth Brandon
•  Buried Treasure: Travels Through the Jewel Box by Victoria Finlay

Writers and Writing

• Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade
•  Colette: Secrets of the Flesh by Judith Thurman
•  I Find Four people by Pamela Frankau
•  One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
• Slipstream by Elizabeth Jane Howard
• Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man by Claire Tomalin
• Words of Love: Passionate Women from Heloise to Sylvia Plath by Pamela Norris
• Young Romantics by Daisy Hay

History

• A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival by Julie Moorhead
• Arbella: England’s Lost Queen by Sarah Gristwood
• From East End to Land’s End: The Evacuation of Jews’ Free School, London, to Mousehole in Cornwall During World War Two by Susan Soyinka
• How Girl Guides Helped to Win the War by Janie Hampton
• Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt
• Moltov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky
• The Blitz: The British Under Attack by Juliet Gardiner
• The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War by Juliet Nicholson
• The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain by Juliet Gardiner
• Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor Englamd by William Penn

Life Stories

• A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier
• Corduroy by Adrian Bell
• Look Back With Love by Dodie Smith
• Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
• My Grandmothers and I by Diana Holman-Hunt
• Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
• The Young Ardizzone by Edward Ardizzone

The Big, Wide World

• Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King
• Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives by Katie Hickman
• Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore
• Maharinis: The Lives and Times of Three Indian Princesses by Lucy Moore
• The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders
• The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein
• Up the Country: Letters from India by Emily Eden

And five years from today the date will be 10th April 2017.

Wish me luck!