I am really looking forward to hearing what titles you have to suggest since non-fiction isn’t my first reading choice and I am sure there is much out there that I shouldn’t be missing.  But I do have a few that I have really enjoyed.

  

 

First two:   House by Tracy Kidder and Walden by Jeffrey Cramer.  Kidder is an excellent writer and his titles span a wide range of topics.  This one is about the building of a house in Amherst.  One of his best known is Mountains Beyond Mountains which is about  Paul Farmer’s work – much of it in Haiti.  Walden is a lovely annotated edition by a local author.

 

David is very well known for his biographies but this title is a little different – it is the story of the building of the Panama Canal – not, as most of his are not, a short read.

 

Dava Sobel is the author of one of my favorite non-fiction titles – Longitude – an absolute gem of a book.  In this one she looks at Galileo’s daughter who was sent to a nunnery – a look at the options open to brilliant women in that time period

 

If you are a birder and you are obsessed and willing to spend a year of your time and lots of money, you can attempt to see more bird species than anyone else in a single year.  I don’t think the winner gets anything except bragging rights but this is a fairly light read – made into an amusing movie with Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Jack Black and John Cleese.

 

My final suggestion is an unusual biography by Peter Ackroyd – instead of writing about a person he is giving you the biography of an entire city.  It’s a slightly different = and interesting – take on history.