Book Talk

NONFICTION NOVEMBER 2026 WEEK 1

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It is that most glorious time of year: NonFiction November! I am unsure how many years this online event has been going on, but it’s one I always look forward to, as I know I will find some great new reads and some fun new book bloggers to follow.

This first week of NonFicNov26 is hosted by Heather, who blogs at Based on a True Story, and the prompt is: 

My Year in Nonfiction
What nonfiction books have you read this year?
What were your favorites?
Did you find yourself reading a particular category of nonfiction most often?

I tend to read more nonfiction than fiction, and 2026 was no exception. This year I have read a total of 26 nonfiction books (with two more underway). There is really no surprise as to the buckets my books fall into. I feel kind of like a broken record, but I read books about books, technology-related books, and then also had a catch-all stack.

Publishers are putting out some really fun books in the “books about books” category. You can geek out as much as you want with media nerds or just float along with another author/book lover. They’re all fun.

Each December/January I pick a big book to read, and Chernow’s Mark Twain was my pick at the beginning of this year. It wasn’t my favorite book I’ve read about Twain, but I enjoyed it.

Honestly, my favorite book out of this stack was Shut Up and Read by Jeannine A. Cook. I do not know what I was expecting, but this memoir of an inner-city indie bookstore/culture center/safe gathering space was inspiring and fun to read. I’ve read quite a few books by shop owners, and I’ve not read anything else like this one.

There were six books in my technology stack, and they all kind of speak to where I am with my thinking and feelings about digital services, tools, and platforms. The two books I reference most these days are Doctorow’s Enshittification, which is spot on with identifying why the web is so awful in so many ways these days, and then Gehl’s Move Slowly and Build Bridges, which is my favorite out of this bunch. 

I am a big fan of Mastodon and all of the Fediverse experiments being created. Gehl’s book did an excellent job explaining how it all got started, why it was started, who was involved, how the protocols and codes of conduct were developed, etc. It’s such a brilliant service and seems to offer real solutions to some of the worst problems of the internet. I want to go deep here about it all, but will keep this post book-focused. If you’re interested in social media and online culture, this is a good read. 

My catch-all pile was all over the place this year. I really enjoyed Murakami’s music book, and I am a sucker for anything Dorothy Parker, but my favorite from this stack is Pimento Cheese: The Southern Spread by Rebecca Lang.

Are we allowed to pick a cookbook as a favorite read? Hope so. I love pimento cheese, and this is a cookbook that has been needed for years. The photos are great, and the recipes cover a wide swath of foodie favorites. I mean look at that photo below – bread, pimento cheese, fried green tomato and bacon?! SO GOOD!

Right now, on my nightstand are The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men by Jon Ronson and Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman (which is my ‘big book’ to read over the holidays).

How about you? If you blog, do a quick post and join the NonFicNov fun! Or if you’d like to just leave a comment, I’d love to know what your favorite nonfiction read was this year. I have decided that the internet is at its best when it’s being used by bookish people. Thank you for reading!

Here is the full list of all the books pictured above:

  1. A Life Among Books by Andrew Norris
  2. Book Collecting and the Search for Reality by Jack Matthews
  3. The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love by Katie Da Cunha Lewin
  4. What’s So Great About the Great Books by Naomi Kanakia
  5. A Group of Londoners by E.V. Lucas
  6. Shut Up and Read: A Memoir from Harriett’s Bookshop by Jeannine A. Cook
  7. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
  8. Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home by Susan Hill
  9. A Degree of Mastery: A Journey through Book Arts Apprenticeship by Annie Tremmel Wilcox
  10. Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-reum
  11. Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber
  12. The Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles by Seth Long
  13. Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media by Robert W. Gehl
  14. Mapmatics: A Mathematician’s Guide to Navigating the World by Paulina Rowinska
  15. The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance by Aram Sinnreich
  16. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
  17. Absolutely on Music: Conversations by Haruki Murakami 
  18. Pimento Cheese: The Southern Spread by Rebecca Lang
  19. Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28 (McNally Editions) by Dorothy Parker
  20. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee
  21. Creating a Salon: The Magic of Conversations that Matter by Linda-Marie Barrett
  22. On Sports by David Macfarlane
  23. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros
  24. Who’s That Girl by Thea Glassman
  25. History Matters by David McCullough
  26. Molly by Blake Butler
Book Reviews

“A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers

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For a while, Chambers’ book seemed to be on the front table of every indie bookstore in town, but I never picked it up. I am glad that it was chosen by Nadja Bester as the October 2026 IndieWeb Book Club pick. It’s one of those books that felt like a balm amidst all the craziness that is swirling about us these days.

book cover

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a short read (only 151 pages), but it moves at such a steady, peaceful pace that time stretches out a bit and you feel like you’re floating in something intentional. The world-building is absolutely amazing. While the characters were fun to walk with (again, no big explosions or troubles), the history of Panga was fascinating. 

I don’t know if there is officially a cozy solarpunk speculative cli-fi category, but this would certainly be the best read to have on that shelf.

The premise follows a tea monk looking for personal meaning as they leave the comfort of their life, looking for more.This tea monk lives on a world that was ravaged by some kind of economic collapse or war that was so devastating that the whole planet now lives in a peaceful harmonious way with the nature around them. Part of that historic fallout was that the servant robots became sentient and ran away to the wilderness to live peacefully there. So we have generations of humans living peacefully, in cities, while robots roam the woods far away. It had been so long since humans and robots interacted that folks treated the idea of robots almost as a myth. Until…

Yep, the tea monk meets a robot who wants to learn about humans, and away we go. Not on a journey of sci-fi battles and lasers, but one of a slow pilgrimage through the wilderness, bouncing questions around about what it means to be human and what humans really want. The whole journey unfurls in the same slow manner tea leaves do when steeping (this book made me very thirsty, and I drank a lot of tea).

The ideas and questions are big for such a slim book. I loved the question about why, after 4 billion years of human growth going just right so that they can be alive, safe, and comfortable … why are they sad? Why do they have longings? Why are they not satisfied? Other animals (as the robot sees all humans) don’t have these issues.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built won the Hugo Award for Best Novella (2022), and was a  Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novella (2021). So it’s certainly known, and I am glad I read it. I know there is a second book in the series, and I’m waiting for the right time to pick it up.

The book did leave me wanting for a map of Panga (they travel so many places on the planet), a family tree of the Gods (all the symbols and relations sounded cool), and more tea!

This is a read for folks who like heartwarming characters that move at their own pace and think big thoughts. Panga was an enjoyable world to visit.

tea cup viewed from top
I did manage to brew more tea.

Alabama, Events, library

Right to Read in Alabama

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The folks at Read Freely Alabama are in Livingston, AL tonight at 6:00 p.m., in the Bell Conference Center and dinner is provided (it’s tacos!) The meeting itself is free and open to the public. On the agenda tonight is an open discussion about challenges to Alabama public libraries around the state and how you can get involved to defend your right to read as well defend libraries and Alabama librarians. It is shaping up to be a lively discussion.

If you are going they ask that you RSVP so they can make sure they have enough seats and food.

And if you can’t make it tonight, Read Freely Alabama is holding more events around the state this October. Hope you can make one of them.

Also, be aware that there is an online discussion planned for Oct. 14 in with the organizers of F.I.R.E. at 6:00 p.m.  So be sure to check that out as well.

Let Books Be Poster by Hyesu Lee

There is a lot going on this week, with it being Banned Books Week, and Saturday being Let Freedom Read Day. It’s nice to see folks in Alabama being fed up with some of our state and local leadership when it comes to out public libraries. Stand up and speak up!

Things to Read

Things to Read – Edition 0006

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This summer I intentionally took a month+ “off” of all things social media and screens. The heat this season has been real and I had lots of travel and offline work to do. So I fully embraced it. It was great. Now I’m starting to scrape the surface of what I missed and what everyone else has been up to. Plenty of news and books to work through in the coming days and I’m actually looking forward to it.

Now that I’m back online, I can say I really missed some of the folks on Mastodon as well as many of the blogs in my RSS reader. I’m enjoying catching up and commenting on the posts and sites that I follow.

In an effort to help shake off my digital cobwebs I wanted to take a minute to share three things that I thought were worth the read:

Time magazine published a piece highlighting the recent numbers showing the decline in adults reading. Plenty of words have been written about this trend, but this piece acknowledges the book as “one of our most effective technologies” and offers solutions to help folks pick up books more often.

This one is worth the click just to see the logo that Amazon has on the front door of one of their warehouses in Las Vegas. Yep, it’s a dinosaur devouring a book. Sign up for that site if you want to read the whole account, but it’s a scanning facility that tears up old books so they can be scanned faster and fed to their AI machines.

I was pleased to see that Kobo ereaders are now back in Best Buy stores. While the prices keep creeping up, I am a HUGE fan of buttons. Does that make me a luddite? Just old? I am not sure, but I do know that turning pages on an ereading device are so much easier when there’s a physical button under your finger. Kobo has one of the last ones.

Hope you all have had a good summer season. Fall is on the way (though that’s hard to believe when the thermometer read 102 degrees yesterday).

Books, Publishing, and Birmingham