It’s week three of Nonfiction November 2024! This week is hosted by Liz, who blogs at Adventures in reading, running and working from home. She’s a fun blogger I started keeping up with after a #NonficNov a few years ago. 

This week’s prompt is:

Week 3 (11/11-11/15) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title.

This year, I’m picking a couple of news-related reads. How people consume and where they get their facts is super important in this social media-soaked era. It’s not very fun, I have to admit. So, I am pairing a relaxed read on how best to think about the news with a fun, classic newspaper book.

First up is my nonfiction pick , News: A User’s Manual, by Alain de Botton. I am a big fan of Alain de Botton and the way he tries to make intentional and philosphical thinking an everyday thing for normal folks like myself.

In News , he does this by breaking down the major types of news that distract or stress us all out. Whether it’s politics, Economics, or celebrity sleaze, his framework offers a clear way of surfing through each day’s headlines while showing impact it has on all of us as a whole.

And for the fiction side of this week’s bookish coin, I am offering up an oldie that was first published in 1938 in England. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop has a list of quirky characters, an easy plot and is dripping in dry humor and satiric wit that you’d expect from Evelyn Waugh.

The story follows William Boot as a “sort of” reporter for the Daily Beast, which is a fictional daily newspaper where Boot is mistakenly identified for another well known writer with the same last name. Boot, with zero skill and full of dread, falls into a real “scoop” when he lands the story of a lifetime. I have to admit that the story didn’t end the way I thought it would, but it was good fun.

Here are my posts from Week Two and Week One of Nonfiction November 2024, if you’re interested. Be sure to click through to Adventures in reading, running and working from home if you’d like to see all of the other pairings.