Week Eight: Nonfiction

Or, as Cole Porter and Peter Bogdanovich might say, "At Long Last, Love." 

I'm a big-time reader of non-fiction.  Not that there's anything wrong with fiction,  I enjoy it, too, but I read far more non-fiction, always have, always will. 

For the first part of this assignment, we read articles by Jennifer Brannen, "Borderlands: Crossing between Fiction and Nonfiction in Readers' Advisory," and Catherine Sheldrick Ross, "Reading Nonfiction for Pleasure: What Motivates Readers?"  Brannen's was a good opinion piece, based on experience and principle, but I found more value to Ross's article, if only because hers is based on interviews and her own personal research.  (To be fair, the articles are two different approaches to the same general subject -- one is opinion-based, and the other research-based). 

The assignment doesn't specify that we're to respond on our blog to the articles, but I wanted to.  One of the quotes in Ross's article reminded me of a dialogue in the 2004 film, Sideways.  The writer, played by Paul Giametti, has been asked by his best friend's father-in-law-to-be about his book:

Miles (Giametti): It's... it's a novel. Fiction. Yes. Although there is quite a bit from my own life... so I suppose that, technically some of it is nonfiction.

Mike (played by Shaun Duke): Good, I like nonfiction. There is so much to know about this world. I think you read something somebody just invented, waste of time.
Miles: That's an interesting perspective.