But what this can sometimes mean is that, because we learned to fall in love with books this way, there’s a whole other group of books out there that sometimes doesn’t get that same kind of instinctual love: the non-fiction genres. I teach early middle school students and I can tell you that I have to maintain my highest levels of excitement to get them to put down their Harry Potters and Ever After Highs for a little bit just so I can convince them how awesome non-fiction can be, particularly favoritest of favorite non-fiction genres: narrative non-fiction. Narrative non-fiction is sometimes rather loosely defined, but for it’s fundamentally this: it’s history for fiction readers. Honestly, I use it as a hook for fiction-obsessed kids for a reason. It’s the best kind of storyteller’s genre. The books in this genre tell tales of places and eras with all the enthralling pull of a true story promise, and enveloping charm of a long tale of adventure and mayhem, woven by the fireside on a long winter’s eve. These stories tend to flow like fiction, with richly described scene-setting beginnings, memorable vignettes told for maximum shock value, amusement or horror, narrative arcs of people analyzed like characters at every turn, and endings that, while not always (or often- unsurprisingly) happily ever after, lead us to a denouement worth waiting for- whether it is of a mystery still ongoing, or the slow decline of an era, watching another one dawn, for better or for worse. And, of course, let us remember that this is the best kind of once upon a time: the kind that really existed. And this does what no amount of timeline making or textbook reading could do: it tells non-fiction in a way that truly makes it come alive. These books use literary devices for the best of purposes: to tell a truth, to truly make us see someone in history as a person, and show us why they mattered. For those for whom these characteristics sound appealing, here are some of my favorite examples of authors whose writing offers some of the best of the genre’s benefits: So go on. There are some long, cold days ahead. Surely you’ve got some time to give this often overlooked genre a try? Really, I promise, it’s just like many of your beloved fiction genres, but with a dose of real. And you know, like Twain said: Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction, after all, has to make sense. But the real life depicted in these books, on the other hand, is often absurd and random and bizarre, which means that you get this wonderful genre, filled with unbelievable stories that need no other justification than their existence to be told.
