Nonfiction Book Reviews

As you all well know, I work at the local library, and believe me when I say that check-in is for me what “Happy Hour” is for the town drunk.  I’m surrounded by a sea of temptation, and sometimes I manage to escape unscathed, but most of the time, I end up carrying home yet more books that are simply too irresistible to pass up.

During check-in hour last week, I was admiring an Eyewitness Book on Titanic, and thinking how interesting it would be to read and review it.  Sure, it was aimed for 9 - 12 year olds, but I’ve often found that unless you’re looking for dry, scholarly facts that only a professor would appreciate, most adult books tend to be too overwhelming.

I’ve said it myself and I’ve heard plenty of other people say it: Nonfiction books are boring!  And yeah, that’s true - some nonfiction books are boring.  (I do my best not to review any on here mainly because I don’t want to read them, but yes, they definitely do exist).  But children’s publishers aren’t stupid - they know that if they print pages with nothing but charts and/or using 16 letter words every other sentence, the kids aren’t going to make it past page two.

They have to make it interesting.  They have to use large colorful pictures.  They have to include factoids that make you go, “Really?  I never knew that.”  They have to engage the reader and make them enjoy learning.

In other words, they have to write the kinds of books us adults would read, if we weren’t so embarrassed to be found hitting the children’s section for reading material.

I also started to think about the fact that the majority of the people who visit this site are parents, so they would enjoy finding books that perhaps they hadn’t heard of before, to check out for their kids to read.  And hey, I’m sure I have a couple of underage readers too, who would enjoy reading the reviews for themselves.

So without further ado, let me introduce a new weekly feature: Fun Fridays, where we review fun kids’ books, instead of the boring adult ones. This will start this Friday (the 18th) and run into the foreseeable future.  So parents, make sure to stop by then, or if your kids are old enough, send them my way.

I’m excited to bring in a new group of readers who may not want to read Total Money Makeover or Sprinkler and Drip Systems but would like to read an interesting book on, say, astronomy.

The only downfall that I can see is that this is going to mean that a huge group of books will now become tempting to me, basically upping the amount of books that I’ll want to take home.

Willpower?  What’s that?

Hava
Who probably ought to join a 12-step program for book addiction…

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