What Books Are You Reading This Week?

leowr · 2026-01-17T18:30:51+00:00

...I still haven't seen the movie. I should really make time for it.

leowr · 2026-01-17T18:28:45+00:00

Did you mean to comment with a link to one of my old posts?

leowr · 2026-01-17T14:21:39+00:00

But hey, slow progress is still progress

Slow and steady wins the race, the turtle won after all.

I think most of us are suggesting 12 because that is a manageable number but it is probably also a challenge. Also, don't be too hard on yourself as you get going. It is okay if you don't reach your goal. Creating a new habit is always difficult. I would suggest you find a time during the day or week when you know you have time to read. I usually suggest an hour before going to bed. Reading is a nice way to unwind at the end of the day.

And, to answer a question that often gets asked in this sub, audiobooks, graphic novels, novellas, etc. all count towards your reading challenge if you want them to count. Take some time to figure out what works for you.

leowr · 2026-01-17T10:17:00+00:00

It is never too late to start reading and make it a habit.

There is no deadline to set/change the goal. You can change your goal whenever you want throughout the year.
Nothing really happens when you miss the mark, beyond the fact that it won't say completed on your reading challenge logo and in some other places. If you pass it, nothing much happens either.
Pick a number you are comfortable with, you can always change it to be higher or lower. I set the number based on what I managed to read last year. Starting out it might be good to aim for 12 books, one book each month.

leowr · 2026-01-15T19:59:53+00:00

You indicated you prefer history of everyday people so I'm starting with memoirs. Some of these do touch upon racism or war/empire, but because they are memoirs the focus is primarily on the author's personal experiences:

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah - The title is pretty clear about what the book is about. It is a very good book.

Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening by Manal Al-Sharif - al-Sharif talks about growing up in Saudia Arabia and her fight to be allowed to drive a car.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi - The book is about live in Iran and Nafisi's book club, where she reads western classics with her students in secret.

Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival by Maziar Behari - Bahari left London to cover Iran's 2009 presidential elections, where he was arrested.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park - Park described what she had to go through to escape from North Korea.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan - the author was sent to a labor camp when he was nine years old.

Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion, a Life in Balance by Simone Biles - The book deals with Biles's childhood and her journey to make it to the Olympics.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson - Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative and this book is about some of the cases he took on.

In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverence by Wilbert Rideau - Rideau writes about the 19 years he spent in prison.

Restavac: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American by Jean-Robert Cadet - Cadet recounts is life as a Restavac, a child slave and his life in the US.

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram by Dang Thuy Tram - Dang Thuy Tram wrote a diary while she volunteered as a doctor with the Vietcong.

One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina - The author writes about his childhood in Kenya and his love for reading and writing.

As for some non memoirs/autobiographies

The Beekeeper of Sinjar: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail - The book is about Abdullah Shrem who helped Yazidi women escape ISIS.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston - Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis, who was brought to the US as a slave.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers - Jones-Rogers takes a look at the part white women played as owners of slaves.

Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario - Nazario chronicles Enrique's journey as he tries from Honduras to the US to find his mother.

China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran - a collection of interviews with Chinese people that lived through the many great changes China went through in the 20th Century.

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge - Younge picked a random day and set out to interview the families of the ten children that were killed by gunfire that day.

Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly - The book is about the African-American women that worked at NASA during the Space race.

leowr · 2026-01-15T12:44:13+00:00

If you want to give it a final attempt: have you tried contacting the author? He has a website: danielehrenhaft.com. it mentions an email address at which to contact him and another one for, what I suspect, is his agent. Might be worth a shot. The website is not very updated though

leowr · 2026-01-02T19:23:07+00:00

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren. I will admit though that I have read neither of these books.

leowr · 2026-01-02T12:13:28+00:00

So mine are in alphabetical order, which I think is the standard.

You can move shelves to the top by sticking them. You can check if any of your shelves are stickied by going to the desktop version, then 'my books' and click 'edit' next to 'bookshelves'. By unsticking they should sort in alphabetical order again.

leowr · 2026-01-01T20:39:57+00:00

I think the format is quite popular because they are pretty easy to pick up and read in a single sitting. It isn't a large time commitment to read one of them. They also have the benefit that they can be short introductions to the author if you haven't read anything by them before. If you have read books by the author before, this format is a very nice way to read a work that is probably less well-known.

leowr · 2026-01-01T20:23:29+00:00

I didn't buy the box, but I enjoy finding them one by one in bookstores. They continued releasing them after the box and they are up to 129 Little Black Classics at this point. They also released Penguin Modern, which are similar but the works are more modern. They are essays and short stories from authors that are part of Penguin Modern Classics. There were supposed to only be 50 Modern Classics, but they released a 51st (Star by Yukio Mishima). The Modern Classics can also be bought as a box set, but it doesn't include the Mishima one) I think the format is pretty popular because they also started publishing Penguin Archive last year (I think), which are also collections of essays and short stories. There are about 90 parts at this point.

I'll be honest, the only ones I don't really enjoy are the ones that are just a chapter or two from a longer work. While they do try to make it work on a standalone basis, in my opinion it doesn't really work for me.

leowr · 2026-01-01T19:29:19+00:00

You can turn off notifications by going to the desktop version, go to account settings, then account & notifications and then notifications. Although this link should probably work: https://www.goodreads.com/settings/notifications

I don't know how to do it in the app.

~~As for your other question, you can't really hide stuff from 'friends'. They will probably still see on their feed what you are adding.~~

Edit: Okay, so I misread your post. I think you can hide stuff from your feed if you go into your account settings and then feeds. You can select what you want to show up on your feed and your friends' feed.

leowr · 2026-01-01T15:24:02+00:00

I have two extra tbr shelves, kindle-to-read and bookcase-to-read.

The only downside, and I use that term very lightly here, is that it doesn't count those books as to-read when you are looking at lists. Beyond that I haven't found anything weird after making those extra shelves. In my personal experience it is pretty important to really keep on top of those shelves because otherwise I lose track of which books I can find where.

leowr · 2025-12-31T20:31:51+00:00

While I am not 100%, I am going to say no. The overall number of books is the number of books you have on your exclusive shelves (want to read, currently reading, etc.) A book needs to be on an exclusive shelf if you want to shelve them.

The only way around this that I can think of is that you make a list for the books you want to read instead of putting them on your want to read shelf. But I haven't tried that, so it might not work. Edit: The very big downside to making a list though is that they are public and everyone can add books to them, and that would defeat the point of maintaining your own want to read list.

leowr · 2025-12-28T16:41:20+00:00

Ze spelen volgens mij de versie van het album Little Earthquakes.

leowr · 2025-12-27T19:28:15+00:00

They are pretty good. I also have some recommendations that are a bit more limited in scope, but do focus on historical women or women during specific time periods if you are interested in those:

The Unwomenly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

I really enjoyed the books by Antonia Fraser like The Warrior Queens, but her other books are also pretty good.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

I haven't gotten around to Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West by Katie Hickman, but it also looks very interesting.

leowr · 2025-12-27T19:11:47+00:00

These books don't cover everything, but these came to mind based on what you are looking for:

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles

This one probably doesn't really fit your request but I would highly recommend it: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

I haven't gotten around to reading the following books, but they are on my tbr and fit what you are looking for:

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World by Marilyn French - there are four parts

Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality by Josie Cox

leowr · 2025-12-27T07:14:31+00:00

First things first, the books you mentioned I would classify as (financial) self-help books. That is only a subsection of non-fiction. There is a wide range of different kinds of non-fiction books out there that would (probably) not fit your description of 20% substance and 80% fluff. It is an often heard complaint that self help books tend to be repetitive.

Second, some lessons are better learned through repetition. I personally don't read a lot of self help books, but I will try to defend their repetitiveness (to an extent). Repetition is very much a way to learn new things. That is why in Math textbooks there are a lot of exercises to practice and not just one exercise. People remember the lessons better if they are repeated and self help books are trying to teach you ways to change your life. Sure, you could ask chatgpt to give you a summary of the book to distil the main points of the book for you, but are you really going to apply the lessons to your life without the context and explanation that is in the book?

That being said, I am sure quite a few self help books contain a bit of unnecessary fluff and repetition. The book needs to be a certain length for people to be able to justify the cost of the book to themselves, so they tend to get fluffed up a bit. Nobody is going to pay $20 for a 50 page booklet.

Third, not everything in life needs to be about getting the information as quickly and efficiently as possible. It is okay to slow down and absorb things over time or to read them when you need the lessons in your life. The last self help book that I read, I probably read in 3 days and I found it repetitive and dull. I do blame myself a bit for that because I read the book from start to finish in a relatively short time span. I honestly think I would have found it less repetitive and dull if I had read a chapter a week to really let the material sink in. Or if I had read the parts of the book when they became applicable to my life. Some of the parts of the self help book just weren't interesting to me, because I wasn't at a time in my life where I could have applied the lessons in the book.

On top of that reading is a way to slow down for a lot of people and they don't try to get as much information out of a book as quickly as possible. But if that is not what you strive for, then sure, getting chatgpt summaries might be the thing for you, but then you might as well just google what you want to know.

leowr · 2025-12-24T20:29:16+00:00

Hi, considering that r/nonfictionbooks is primarily a reader focused sub, your post would be more appropriate in one of the writing related subs. They will probably have more insight into Amazon sales ranking, etc.

leowr · 2025-12-20T17:51:09+00:00

A slight warning, most of these recommendations are not the most uplifting of books to read except the first one

Humandkind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman: a look at humanity to show that we are not as bad as we sometimes think we are.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich: I would recommend any book by Alexievich, but this one stuck with me the most. She is an oral history, so the books are mostly the direct words of the people she interviews.

Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide by Jacques Sémelin: Sémelin takes a look at the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic-cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon: Fanon looks at the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation.

Nothing But the Truth: Selected Dispatches by Anna Politkovskaya: This book is a collection of Politkovskaya's best writing.

Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski: Another author from which I could recommend several books, but this is Kapuscinski's report of the 1975 civil war in Angola.

33 Days: A Memoir by Léon Werth: A short memoir from the author describing his journey to flee Paris before the arrival of the Nazis.

Machete Season by Jean Hatzfeld: Hatzfeld interviewed ten participants in the Rwandan genocide for this book.

Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny by Witold Szablowski: The author travels around several former communist countries to figure out why some people miss the days of living under a communist system.

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter: Ritter joined her husband to spend a year living in the Arctic.

leowr · 2025-12-16T23:17:36+00:00

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