Nonfiction Roundup: February 2024

Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in February. All of the mentioned titles are available to put on hold in our catalog and will also be made available via the library’s Overdrive website on the day of publication in eBook and downloadable audiobook format (as available). For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month, check our online catalog.

Top Picks

“Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out” by Shannon Reed (Feb 6)
We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human. Shannon Reed, a longtime teacher, lifelong reader, and New Yorker contributor, gets it. With one simple goal in mind, she makes the case that we should read for pleasure above all else. In this whip-smart, laugh-out-loud-funny collection, Reed shares surprising stories from her life as a reader and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students. From the varied novels she cherishes (“Gone Girl,” “Their Eyes Were Watching God”) to the ones she didn’t (“Tess of the d’Urbervilles”), Reed takes us on a rollicking tour through the comforting world of literature, celebrating the books we love, the readers who love them, and the ways in which literature can transform us for the better.

“The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center” by Rhaina Cohen (Feb 13)
Why do we assume romantic relationships are more important than friendships? What do we lose when we expect a spouse to meet all our needs? And what can we learn about commitment, love and family from people who put deep friendship at the center of their lives? In “The Other Significant Others,” NPR’s Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner — these are friends who are home co-owners, co-parents or each other’s caregivers. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life — spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more — reveal how freeing and challenging it can be to embrace a relationship model that society doesn’t recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn’t limited to daydreams and episodes of “The Golden Girls,” but actually possible in real life. Based on years of original reporting and striking social science research, Cohen argues that we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them, while we diminish friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed or divorced, or feeling the effects of the “loneliness epidemic,” Cohen insists that we recognize the many forms of profound connection that can anchor our lives.

“Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History” by Philippa Gregory (Feb 27)
Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s “Normal Women.” In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women — some 50% of the population — center stage. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The “normal women” you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot. A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, “Normal Women” chronicles centuries of social and cultural change — from 1066 to modern times — powered by the determination, persistence and effectiveness of women.