Vacation-Qualified Non-Fiction
Enjoyment-qualified #88
If you ask me, there’s non-fiction and there’s NON-FICTION. The latter is the dense, footnoted kind of book where people read it and feel compelled to Tweet about all the concepts they just gleaned from it because they are intolerably smug they have to justify the hours they just spent on a framework book they were just so inspired by it.
I kid, I kid - I can get behind a substantive non-fiction book when I’m in the learning mindset. But when it comes to a vacation non-fiction read (and I always require one, read more about my vacation book packing guide here), here’s what I want:
A narrative and propulsive read: do not bring your academic dissertation up in here, slap in a few new intros, and expect us to pretend this is a beach read, sir/madam/non-binary friend! First and foremost, this should be *a good read.*
A human-driven story: maybe it’s true crime, maybe it’s a memoir, maybe it’s a historical accounting, but for me personally, if I can’t connect with the human aspect of a story, I can’t really dissolve into it the way I want to.
An accessible look into something I didn’t know: yeah, this is true of the other kind of non-fiction too, but of course, the best non-fiction takes you deeper into a topic or industry and leaves you wondering where the past few hours of reading went.
The occasional wow-moment: look, you have to have something new to talk about with your vacation travel partners, you’ve seen each other for four days straight, amirite.
Here are a few vacation-qualified non-fiction books - and please leave your vacation non-fiction suggestions in the comments, because your girl has some travel coming!
My friend Danielle actually recommended The Battle of Versailles for a vacation, and she was right! This is an absolutely fun, fascinating look at the night in 1973 when the French fashion industry hosted American designers and models for a joint fashion show that essentially put American fashion on the global stage against all odds.
Even if a book about fashion doesn’t sound like your style (yes, hi, you’re welcome), this is a terrific look at the global forces and biases (tradition, race, gender, youth, etc etc) that shaped fashion and therefore culture and on the handful of influential people, mostly women, who were really responsible for elevating an entire industry. It’s also written in a masterfully effortless way by Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Robin Givhan, so you see all the substance but never feel the work.
What are these lambs? Permit me to explain.
If you ever loved a Shark Week episode, if you enjoy stories about the gossamer-thin veneer between “civilization” and the untamed wild, or if you’re interested in the ways that intensity slips into dangerous obsession, The Devil’s Teeth is for you.
Journalist Susan Casey becomes obsessed with the great white sharks of the Farrallon Islands off of San Francisco, a remote and unforgiving nature outpost, and finds a way to spend weeks studying the sharks (and the people who study them). The first half of the book is all about great whites and the natural habitat - thrilling, tense, fascinating. Without spoiling it, the second half becomes something much odder, more focused on Casey herself and the inexplicable choices she makes that slip from journalism into ferocious compulsion. Less sharky but equally as memorable.
Have we talked about Orange is the New Black? (Honestly, shouldn't I know?) Okay, okay, yes, I know it’s actually about a woman’s experience in a medium-security prison, and also yeah you watched the Netflix show with the slock and the lurid violence and is this really what you want to read poolside? But hear me out - this checks all the vacation boxes.
I read all the prison memoirs and this is amongst the absolute most readable, which is saying something. Smart, surprisingly funny, and moving.
Kerman is so honest and revealing not only about herself and the choices that led a “nice white lady” to prison, but also about the many women she encountered and leaned on in and outside of prison. So deeply human.
She weaves in just enough information about the incarceration system to really universalize the criminal justice experience.
Lotta wow and “what?” and “man, that is heartbreaking/inspiring/ingenious” moments. Lots.
After writing this, I remembered that I *did* read this poolside on a vacation. Field tested!
So, okay - this is a bit of a wild-card suggestion (as much as a New York Times Bestseller that everyone has already read can be a wild-card, wow, I’m such a maverick). The Boys in the Boat is about a group of collegiate farmboys-turned-champion rowers who fight macro and micro and also literal headwinds to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
We listened to this audiobook on an Actual Vacation (more field-testing) and I *think* any quarrels I had come down to the fact that I just don’t love audiobooks. For me, it was a little overly stuffed with narratives that were in themselves quite compelling but taken together, felt a little in need of an edit, especially when listening. It’s a poor motherless boy treated terribly by his family! It’s a prodigy boat-builder! It’s Hitler and Goebbels! It’s a national rivalry! Etc. But dammit if I didn’t get chills in a number of places and I think it would be just as moving and less flabby-feeling if you read it (or if you liked audiobooks).
And of course, I recommend so many investigative non-fiction options - check out my recos from waaaay back in week FOUR when this was a newsletter embryo. A simpler time.
My Non-Fiction Footnotes, Which Is Probably the Closest I’ll Ever Get to a Dissertation Because Who Has the Working Memory Anymore?
All links go to Bookshop.org, which supports indie bookstores and is a noble endeavor. Unless they go to …
Past newsletters, all of which you can find in the archive! So if you’re looking for fiction, fantasy, memoirs, or basically anything that’s not what you just read, you can find 87 other weeks of suggestions. Also, thank you for reading this far if non-fiction is not for you! You’re a warrior and also, you should know …
I’m so grateful you’re here. This little ol’ newsletter (which will be on a two-week late summer hiatus) is a labor of love and every like, comment or share is truly a gift to me. So thanks.
