Category Archives: Book Talk

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
Alabama, Book Talk, Reading as Resistance

Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Alabama

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Today in 1851, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was first published in The National Era newspaper.

It continued to run in the newspaper for the next 11 months, a few chapters at a time, helping people understand the evil of slavery until the columns were collected and published in book form on March 20, 1852. (Here’s a link to get a copy from Project Gutenberg.)

Title page from first paperback copy.

Once Stowe’s story was published as a book it helped the antislavery movement ramp up. It sold very well throughout the country, with reports of it selling 50,000 copies in the first six weeks. (If you are into stories from the history of publishing here is a amazingly detailed account of what it took to bring this book to print.)

This a great historical account of the power of books. One we need to remember here in Alabama, because in 1856, the South’s largest bookstore was in Mobile, Alabama…

Strickland & Co., had been in business at the corner of Dauphin Street and Water Street for many years when the local Vigilance Committee (a legal group of locals charged with squashing antislavery efforts) nabbed the bookshop’s two owners and drilled them about their books.

text from old newspaper
The story was even reported on by the NY Times.

It turns out they were guilty of selling a single copy of Frederick Douglass’ Autographs of Freedom as well as having had 50 copies of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin on hand. The booksellers were told they were “…“dangerous to the community” and that, unless they and their families left within five days, their safety could not be guaranteed.” There is a good write-up with even more details here in The Mobile Bay magazine. The Vigilance Committee was publicly praised by government officials and local media for running the booksellers out of town and closing down the bookstore. 

It was gross. We should all be embarrassed by this incident. But, sadly, it’s not too far from where we are these days with Alabama voting districts being redrawn and funding being pulled from Alabama libraries over book banning.

It is gross, and we should all be embarrassed. 

All that to say if you are around the Birmingham, AL area, then check out the Read Freely Alabama group and keep up with the events and news they share. It’s important.

*Also, buy books. Read physical books. Have them at home. Digital books are fine (I did link to Project Gutenberg earlier). It’s just that digital media be deleted/changed/tracked in a way that a printed book cannot. It’s happened before (most famously in 2009) and just like the attack on that Mobile bookstore and libraries today, it will happen again. These stories need to be protected and remembered so we can do better. 

Book Reviews, Book Talk

“Screen People” by Megan Garber

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I finished this Megan Garber’s Screen People last night and wanted to type up a quick review.

Screen People cover

If you know the names Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman then you can probably skip this one. If you don’t recognize those names then the first couple of chapters of Garber’s “Screen People” will feel like fresh air to you (and then skip to the last few).

The chapters of the book are named after parts of a tv show or movie and the metaphor doesn’t really carry through, the middle, very well. While I 100% agree with what the book asserts (tech issues, Trump, toxicity, media diets, etc.) it just lacked some clarity and AN INDEX, PLEASE! That was my biggest gripe – for all this effort and event citations and science paper quoting – we needed an index and bibliography. I did lots of underlining and I’m already on board with where Garber is writing from. I just want to be able to look up these bills, hearings, books, news events, and science papers to do more digging.

Screen People TOC

All the usual suspected are here with the politics, miopic tech leaders, QANON, etc. and Garber does a good job early on showing how our current networks and technology enable and help all those bad actors.

“Social media is a mini narcissism engine.”
“Americans often talk about ‘the algorithms’ in the same rough ways that ancient people used to describe their gods…”

Screen People mentions lots of bad things right alongside the word “platforms”, but never connects the dots & doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions either. I am bumping it up to a 3/5 because I absolutely agree with the subtitle How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency. That is indeed spot on. 

Birmingham, Book Talk, Bookstores, On the Web

Kathleen Schmidt Interview with Books-A-Million CEO Terry Finley

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Here’s an interview with the CEO of Birmingham/Homewood-based bookstore chain Books-A-Million, Terry Finley. Finley (Instagram) has been in bookselling for 50 years. Schmidt’s Publishing Confidential newsletter is book and publishing focused and always an interesting read.

BAM is an interesting company due to its larger size and regional approach to operations. They have stores in 32 states and have recently opened a large and well laid out shop in Bloomington, MN. The Twin Cities are an amazingly bookish part of the country and I’m excited to see how this new store shapes up.

The front of BAM in Bloomington, MN

Here are a few more photos I took, inside their new store, on a recent visit this year. The aisle layout was fun and added to the book discovery journey. There are so many books there!

A couple of the interview questions I found really interesting shine a spotlight on how Books-A-Million approaches books vs. entertainment vs. lifestyle items, as well as how Dungeon Crawler Carl (published in August 2024; these covers are great fun!) became their 2025 Book of the Year. I’m also really curious about the in-store AI Search tools as I have not seen that in action yet. I may have to go to BAM with a question for an associate to see how and how well that works.

Schmidt’s interview is worth a read for a glimpse behind the curtain at Books-A-Million.