The exams are drawing closer and you may be panicking, feeling that you really ought to be reading something English to give your vocabulary and style a last-minute boost. Now, some of you are clearly voracious bookworms, but others don’t like books and particularly dislike fiction.
To some extent, I sympathize. As I grow older (o the grey hairs, how they sprout!), I find myself drawn much more to well-written non-fiction books. They frequently tell even more exciting tales than novels, don’t annoy me with unlikely plot developments and leave a nice afterglow of having learned something new.
So, over the next weeks, I’ll be presenting you with a number of non-fiction books that I highly recommend because they are extremely riveting. They will be about:
- a cholera epidemic
- navigation
- the production of food in the present-day USA
- one of the most exciting years in the history of the USA
- mountain climbing
- battles
- mad people who reenact battles
It’s very likely that to this date, you’ve never felt any interest in any of these topics, but I promise, all of them are very exciting and they are all so well-written that you will smell the stench of 19th-century London, freeze to the bone at the Delaware and in the Himalayas, vow to never eat a Chicken McNugget again but keep chickens instead, climb over the bodies of many dead French soldiers, spend a night in the company of Confederate ghosts and hear the ticking of a clock that saved thousands of lives.
Seriously.
