rivendellrose | talking meme day 4 (Reply)

fiachairecht asked "What is your favourite sort of nonfiction to read, and why? Any recs?"

My favorite type of nonfiction to read is history books, specifically domestic histories of the middle ages through the 19th century. I love the ancient world, too, but it's harder to find domestic histories in that era, and I tend not to go out of my way to find them in quite the same way that I do the later periods.

When I say domestic histories, I mean a number of things. First off, I have next to zero interest in history that goes along the lines of "There was a war in thus-and-such year and this is how the kings and generals and whatnot played out the various battles and strategies of that war." I studied medieval history in college a bit, and I also spend a disturbing amount of time watching BBC history documentaries on YouTube, and it's just generally impossible to completely avoid this stuff because if you're interested in the history of normal people living their lives, war does creep in. So I do have some sense of this sort of thing. And I'm not totally against kings and important people in my history, just... resigned to the fact that they're the ones we have the most complete records about. But I get bored fairly quickly if a book focuses too much on that sort of thing. I probably mean "people-oriented" almost as much as I mean "domestic," at least some of the time, but that gives the impression that I love biographies, which I generally don't (with some exceptions).

What I'm much more interested in is how people lived, whether during a war or not. Daily life, yes, but also how they handled the big picture stuff and what they thought about things and how they conceptualized their universe. I'm also heavily biased toward women's experiences in any period of history (which biases me toward domestic history over military history because... that tends to be where women actually show up in these periods of history, with some impressive exceptions). So, that said, here are a few books I think handle this very well:

How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman. Remember those BBC documentaries I mentioned? I discovered Ruth Goodman through those, and she is the kind of historian who made me go "God damn it, if I'd realized that kind of history was a possibility I would never have switched over to anthropology!" Goodman believes in hands-on history -- she does the research, but she's a fan of getting her hands dirty and trying things out, too, whether that means learning the style of sewing that women (girls, really, starting as young as 5) learned in needlecraft schools in the 19th century or actually doing laundry and farm chores in Tudor-era clothing (proper stuff, not costume stuff), and testing recipes for tooth-cleaner from the Victorian era. This book is amazing, I love it so much. She also has a book called How to be a Tudor, which is also quite good but is not, for my money, quite as amazing because there isn't as much documentary evidence for her to rely on in addition to her personal experiences. Still highly worthwhile if you have any interest in the period, though. (Goodman also recently put out a book called How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England, and while I can't comment on it yet, it's on my Christmas list.)

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley. Another BBC presenter who I got very attached to after watching documentaries. This one is less living-history, but it's very much about the real person Jane Austen and her life and what that was like, as seen through the narrative device of examining each of the places where she lived and what was going on in her life at the time she lived there. Worsley is a much more traditional historian than Goodman, but she's still fun and easy to read, and she really knows her stuff. Also, her enthusiasm for Austen definitely shows through.

Mistress of the Vatican by Eleanor Herman. It's probably be unfair to call this a domestic history, but how often do the capital H Histories find time to focus on the sister-in-law of the pope, even if she's balls-to-the-walls badass enough that she was arguably running the Vatican during her brother-in-law's reign. Olimpia is one of those fascinating characters from history who is far from likable, but is still eminently sympathetic in a lot of ways, particularly in Herman's telling. These are fascinating, bigger than life people living complicated, deeply political lives. Her other history books, Sex with the King, Sex with the Queen, and The Royal Art of Poison (which I am currently reading) are also pretty entertaining, but this one is the "holy crap wow!" of her ouevre, I'd say. It's as much a book about the time period and the place and the other people around her as it is a biography of Olimpia, probably, which I think is what saves it from "eugh, biography" syndrome.

Do I read male historians? Uhhhh... sometimes?

The Time-Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer, is a pretty fun and interesting history book that does what it says on the tin -- the conceit of being a sort of travel guide for time-travellers keeps it light and helps to contextualize history for people who don't know a lot about it, and he gives enough detail that it's still interesting to, uh, people like me who just obsessively read everything about their favorite stuff even if it probably won't really give them anything new. Mortimer put out a Time Traveller's Guide to Tudor England as well, but I haven't read it and probably won't, because I can't imagine he'd be anywhere near half as interesting as Ruth Goodman.

Black Tudors, by Miranda Kaufmann. This isn't one of my "it's on my shelf and I reread it all the time" books, but I really appreciated it for looking at a subject that gets ignored far too much (including by Ian Mortimer) -- the fact that there were black people in Tudor England, and not all of them were slaves. What really kept this from being a book that I love is that there wasn't enough information for immense amounts of detail. The records are there, but they're thin, and while Kaufmann does the best she can with the material she has, the result wasn't as in-depth as I'd hoped.

The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders. Holy shit if you have any interest in crime fiction, read this book. It's a doorstop, but it is an absolutely fascinating look into the history of crime and crime fiction and the subtitle, How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, is not joking around. And neither is Judith Flanders when it comes to her research. Lucy Worsley has a similar but less compendious book called The Art of the English Murder, but since she acknowledges using Flanders as a major source on this subject, I figure it's better to just read this unless you're short on time and need something shorter and pithier. I read both, and rather regretted having bothered, despite still enjoying Worsley's style. (In some of Flanders' other books I've found she relies/focuses a bit too much for my tastes on the writings of Charles Dickens, but this is the least Dickens-heavy of her books that I've read. If you're into Dickens, then she is an author whose bibliography you could wallow in. If, like me, your feelings on him are somewhat mixed and rather "meh," you might want to tread cautiously through the rest of her catalogue.)

That's everything I can think of right now -- I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night horrified that I forgot something. But that's a quick tour through my current "this is the stuff I read far too much of" area.