Nonfiction Recommendations and TBR

good morning welcome to books at the bottom of the stairs my name's laureen i would like to thank everybody who watched my newbie tag video last week i'm so excited i've had at least 77 views and if i take that an average over the rest of the uh year that will give my dream of five views a week on a reality so thank you very much and i've never had that many views for anything so just like two triumphs it was just wonderful thank you so much and i'm so glad for some of your comments i really appreciate it um it's been a bit of a skewed morning in terms of trying to film as um so far i've been interrupted on four separate occasions and it turned out i hadn't actually videotaped anything because somehow i didn't turn the camera on and just below the screen i don't know if we'll see her the little cat who always stays hidden has decided it's time to play with um one of her toys so we we may see her scoot by but she's very shy she's been spending the morning with her back to us under the couch we're not sure what we've done wrong but clearly she's upset with us if you um hear some funny noise that's missy having fun for a change okay the excitement today along with my excitement over the new tube tag is that uh nonfiction november is coming up next month and i'm going to link a book olive below as well as um oh my goodness i keep forgetting her name that's terrible of me i'll have to put it up in the cards but she has also got some information with respect to non-fiction november and november is the month where the challenge is to read a minimum of one non-fiction book over the course of the month and if you normally read one try to read two and so on and there are prompts for the non-fiction month so that will help to organize your selections if you want so one of the things that we do that are we're participants that the participants are doing is making recommendations so that's the first thing i'm going to do for you and um i've got four books that i have read sometime in my past of course and uh i really think these are solid books i think anybody can read them i would recommend them over and over again and the little squeak is a mouse that's being a fake mouse that's being killed all right this is salt a world history and it is by mark kurlansky and it was published in 2002 and it was sort of a pivotal pivotal book for me because it was the second one that i read where the public readership general was definitely geared towards the the author really knew who the audience was and uh the one that really turned things around for me is with respect to nonfiction and i don't have it i'll put it up in the um i'll put it up here [Music] is a book about how to discover the latitudes and the longitudes and so that ships at sea would not get lost and they would be able to navigate more clearly instead of using uh the stars and the sun and landmarks and especially you know if it gets foggy or rainy those things disappear and it's kind of luck of the draw that so it was significant both in terms of saving lives and improving shipping alternatives so that was the first book that turned things around for me because it was definitely geared to readership that would have not have any prior knowledge and would not be interested in the jargon and the academic arguments so this book salt is definitely along the same lines and it takes a history of assault and sees it through its economic life its historical life with respect to storytelling or culture and how it was viewed as as a precious object and then how it becomes perhaps in our world not so precious although if you i know there's a fairy tale out there where um the king wants to know what his three daughters would bring him if to show his love and one brings gold one brings riches and the youngest brings salt and he doesn't get it and you know she gets banished so on and years later he shows up at wherever she is and so she serves him a food dish without any salt in it and then um you know he's kind of outraged and then she serves the dish with salt and she says do you understand what i'm saying now papa and he realizes not only that that's his third daughter but that's um you know the metaphor was that salt flavors everything and needs to be an essential ingredient in food and apparently relationships so i digress salt is a really solid book um and there's there's a few illustrations it's both american and european and asian and i just really loved it i tore through this book at the time there's a couple of little recipes along the way and yeah really totally five out of five on this okay the next one not too long ago i was in ottawa well before the pandemic and uh visiting our daughter and we went to um i'm not telling you a lie yes i am telling you a lie i beg your pardon we were in toronto we met her in toronto and we went to the rom there which is something that they used to do when they were kiddies and this book was published in 2018 it is called the rise and the fall of dinosaurs and it is by steve brussati and we picked this up she really you know we went to the rom back when she was a little kid with also with her brother always dinosaurs bat cave and then after that it was anyone's guess what we would go see so we went back for nostalgic reasons and we discovered this in the gift shop and this takes us through a new history of a lost world and what the author has done has taken all the sort of paleontological paleontological maybe i shouldn't make up words it takes the history of paleontology and looks at it again through modern discoveries in techniques so you know carbon dating different kinds of microscopes different kinds of geological discoveries some of the theories around extinction and so forth have flipped to some degree or have skewed to a different kind of an argument so he's viewing these things through a very up-to-date technological lens and um doesn't change anything significantly in terms of you know the extinction lines and who is in what period but it's able to a lot of the theory has been proven as opposed to just kind of wondering about so that's a really wonderful book and again we just ripped through it and i think it was in the mail very quickly she was on my back instantaneously have you finished that book can you mail it to me can you mail it to me so um that was rock solid okay the other two i've been working on this summer and this one i did finish and i'm sure i spoke about it david attenborough life on earth and it too is a book about evolution and is so readable he is such a good author and i think had i mentioned at the time that he put some of these evolutionary events in the context of might what might have been happening with the birds or with the amoebas or or um [Music] water rising water falling gases in the air that kind of thing so unlike some books where it's just definitely about um let's just say the the extinctions and that's and it sort of vaguely mentions the creatures that might have been around for extinction number two or what have you this takes a you get all the players in the different events if that makes sense anyways um go see the other review i did on it and maybe it's more coherent but yes pictures modern pictures of modern animals so that was one of the things that was interesting too because he does bring it up to who's related to whom and uh i did find the section on jellyfish to be kind of creepy and he's got a very interesting take on humans our evolutionary thing and i guess our i'm sure he didn't invent this but the topic of communication is what seems to be able to set us apart as a species so it was very interesting to um be reading about things like the larynx and the jaws and the structure of the neck and so forth to see how physically we were able to communicate so that was definitely a five out of five and this one i'm working my way through on audio and it is grim an inconvenient indian a curious account of native people in north america by thomas king it's just when i say grimm he's got this way of presenting um a really bad fact let's just pretend a massacre of a tribe of uh first peoples and he's got this sardonic way of presenting it be i it's really something you will get much more power out of if you do it as a an audio book the person who's reading it has got great delivery very well articulated good allocation but also just really knows how to bring the audience in so that you're thinking how is he going to do this and then he throws in a sidewinder and you think that's not funny at all and yet you can see how the author has somehow brought the subject matter up to being viewed in such a way that it's not quite so devastating and horrific and i don't really know how to explain it he's just taken it so that it's not toxic they're the same topics around you know cultural eradication language removal people going on to reservations massacres all these smallpox all these things but what he's done is he's sort of detoxified it so that the reader or the listener can look at it in such a way that there aren't as many trigger points and i think that's just just really fascinating but i ha i do remember reading this many years ago but i'm finding listening to it on audio is bringing so much more of it to life because thomas king if nothing else is just a genius storyteller and so he's taken the non-fiction elements of what's happened to first nations peoples and turned it into story which is definitely a value held by first nations is that the history is definitely story based so those are my four recommendations i think any one of those would be brilliant um if you're just going to read one book i would choose any one of those for those that i'm going to be reading myself the prompts that book olive whose name actually is olive have given us is collection industry style and treatment so the books i've chosen i did not know what the prompts were going to be i just chose books that i was pretty sure that i would have stick-to-itiveness in it so i'm not sure if any of these will work this one mudlarking has been on my get from the library list for an eternity it took forever for it to arrive this is in search of london's past along the river thames by laura mae clem it came out one or two years ago and it's just taken me that long to be able to get into it and or to to get it in the house so what she's doing is she's going along the tide siam edges of the thames in the estuary and she's just describing there it is in central london um she's just describing what it's like to go searching for artifacts along the shorelines and i it was recommended by a book owl of last year i believe and i think a couple of other authors really enjoyed it so um yeah i just think it'd be kind of cool i really have no idea what's coming and we discussed whether it would make sense as a read-aloud but i don't i don't know steve read the first chapter i think we're going to be reading it side by side instead of as a a read-aloud okay this one continuing the theme in my world this year of uh evolution i don't know why i got really entranced by that i think partly i was just luck of the draw you know it just happens to have a number of really good books or i've come under my nose so um it's not necessarily a big topic in the book book world but i just i'm noticing it so this is another one it is the ends of the world volcanic apocalypses lethal oceans and our quest to understand earth's past mass extinctions by peter brennan i think it's gonna be about rocks i guess i don't know i think this one might be a bit more i like a bit more brainiac i'm not sure i don't think it really um i don't think it's it's not as if there's a lot of persons in this book you know like they're the author hasn't gone to this reacher searcher and had coffee with them i don't think we're going to get that kind of thing so i really don't know what to expect from this book so it's going to be interesting um i am in the middle of reading this one to be completely honest john green the anthropocene um reviewed now he did this as a podcast for a couple of years and i think that these are his best podcasts uh captured in text because as i've been reading them i'm probably about halfway through i have recognized one or two of the topics and what he's doing in this collection of um i guess essays a podcast essays he is taking two things and not necessarily comparing them but just examining them from um their inception to their impact and how they are in our world today and then he ranks them from i think i think they're one to five he ranks running shoes maybe he might give them a three out of five and hair color for whatever reason he might give a one out of five um anyways they're light they're very easy to read they're they're maybe oh anywhere from four to six pages long and it's a great bedside book um and you just read one or two sometimes i get really caught up into it and i read a couple i don't think the podcast is on the go anymore i think that that was just a project that he did for about two years something like that and um anyways this is a really john green you probably know him from turtles all the way down and the fault in our stars he was writing for a young adult and so was very popular that this one is breath and it was recommended to me by my good friend cheryl the new science of a lost art written by james nestor and this is really interesting especially given my recent illness with blood clots in the lungs breathing for me has become a hot topic and he talks about how our face and our jaw and our neck have over time changed quite considerably from our and our ancestors let's say because once we've learned how to heat food then it softens it so the whole purpose of molars changes and our eating habits become more forward as opposed to more grindy and so this eventually shifts the jawline and shifting the jawline can shift the soft palate which changes the position of the tongue which leads to snoring and just all the different ways that we breathe especially in our society where we are seated most of the time and this changes the expansion range of our lungs he goes through all kinds of research and all kinds of practices that have been discovered and let go of a deep breathing was used for helping patients with emphysema and it was very successful but because the person who was doing it was not a scientist per se it just kind of fell off the radar it's now being rediscovered and these kinds of things just seem to keep happening if it's not accredited um sort of prior to 1990s let's say it didn't have validity and it just got lost current researchers are discovering some of these breathing techniques i was in the middle of being very profound and the computer died so um continuity will not look good and the kitty cat's playing for a few seconds taz is back so completely disrupted my thoughts i was talking about breath by james nestor and i really don't know what i was saying anymore but i recommend it i think you'll enjoy it it's very accessible and the author is definitely part of the story if you like that kind of memoir nonfiction and one of the things i like about this book is that he does have quite a section on the breathing techniques he discovers and he elaborates on the research that he's done there's a um [Music] i said footnotes yeah i guess there's sort of notes as opposed to footnotes and he has an index and presumably that includes the bibliography so anyhow um a lot of people waiting for this book so i'm not actually going to read it for non-fiction november i'm just pretending don't tell anyone because there's a whole lineup of cheryl's friends waiting for this book all right the last third i'm sure that most of you have got these shenanigans going on behind the scenes you know where you think oh everything's fine and then you realize oh gosh i've got i've sat down on the one and only thorn there is in the house or what have you that was the 11 o'clock bird going past and it's just been one of those filming days never mind we are still up and breathing whereas the dinosaurs are not i would like to thank madworld 1962 for recommending this book he wrecked this person recommended it when i was commenting on the david attenborough book over the summer and suggested that this book would be just the piece to fill in the parts that i was missing and so extinction and evolution what fossils revealed about the history of life by niles eldridge and as mad world 1960 d pointed out look what i opened to there were a lot of pictures so this is a bit of a coffee table book um there's text and there's captions and i love a good caption and there's plenty and plenty of of um different kinds of things i i think this is going to be a good one to read between the other books and i this is from the library and i see that other people have um earned is that what you call it ear dogged dog-eared some pages in here so there must be some good hot stuff coming my way thank you mad world 1962. all right the only part i haven't talked about um were the props and the prompts that olive has given us for this year are collection industry style and treatment so as i said i did not choose my books with these in mind because she doesn't release them until nowish so i think that in order to fill things up i'm going to go with this one for style because it's kind of the current um top hot topic you know it's it's on the front of all the um bestseller lists and so on so it's kind of what's groovin john green anthropine anthropocene reviewed i think i'm going to also put in um no not style i'm going to put this in industry because he's definitely looking on our human-centered planet and how our industrial revolution and so on have impacted the planet and just considering that okay the ends of the world i'm going to put it uh under collection because there are a lot of rocks and mud lark i'm going to put under style because you have to wear really cool boots when you go into the muddy spots in the river and you gotta look kind of styling while you're digging deep in the duck muck and extinction of evolution i am going to put under collection as well collection of history and you know i don't have anything for treatment i guess well maybe something will come up you know there's recommendations that um i'm following from other booktubers so i may be able to squeeze someone in and uh i already have a couple of recommendations from other booktubers so i don't know if i'll fit it in because i also have the non-fiction from october to fit in just to filter it through nothing that none of this is on a time sensitive except that i have to return them to the library and somewhere in here oh here it is i am currently reading the dragon thief which is a continuation of dragons in the bag which i did not think had a sequel but turns out it does and this is by zetta elliott it is a middle reader book and it continues the drama of three dragons that have come to new york and what are you going to do with them how are you gonna solve this magic and just yeah cool i think it'll be fun that's it for me today that's a bit long i hope you enjoy it and uh i guess i'll see you next week with who knows what adventure i'll come up with then i hope your reading adventures and dreams all come true and i'll see you in a little while bye-bye

Channel: Books at the Bottom of the Stairs

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Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021