Adventurous Beginner

That's phrased like it's something I'm telling you to do, but really it's my advice to myself.

Whenever I'm in a reading rut, with a bunch of half-finished books piling up on my Kindle that I'm not excited about finishing, it's because I've been choosing too many books that I want to have read, but don't actually want to read. They're the kind of books that are a means to an end: health advice, career advice, self-help books, pop-psychology books that are half science and half self-help, books that will make me a more informed citizen, etc. When I read too much of this stuff, I get burned out.

For some, the remedy might be to read more fiction. I don't dislike fiction, but I have a lot more nonfiction books on my want-to-read list. My remedy is to choose some escapist nonfiction.

Escapist nonfiction doesn't have to be about light, pleasant subjects. It just has to be about topics that I don't usually think about and that aren't obviously relevant to my everyday life. For me, some good topics are: animals, science, pop culture, histories of forgotten events or everyday life in different places and times, books about jobs I've never done and never will, and technologies that have never been accused of undermining democracy. Things that won't make me think, I should really... or They should really... Topics that transport me to another reality, the same way fiction can.

Some topics that are definitely not escapist for me are: computers, the internet, teaching, learning, and education, politics, feminism, psychology, the economy, health, climate, and any kind of advice book. I'll keep reading books about those subjects, but I think it's good to balance them out with some from the other category. Maybe by alternating?

Here are some books I've enjoyed reading that were escapist nonfiction for me:

• Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness by Nathanael Johnson
• Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century by Kevin Fong
• If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
• Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
• Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson
• Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber
• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
• The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by Lynne Murphy

And here are some from my to-read list:

• A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology by Toby Wilkinson
• We Were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene by Stacy Russo
• Lundy, Rockall, Dogger, Fair Isle: A Celebration of the Islands Around Britain by Mathew Clayton and Anthony Atkinson
• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
• Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill
• A History of the Paper Pattern Industry: The Home Dressmaking Fashion Revolution by Joy Spanabel Emery
• The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage
• How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop by Dave Tompkins
• Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins by Anthony Slide
• Jane Austen, Game Theorist by Michael Suk-Young Chwe
• Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton