LJ Series "Redefining RA": Exploring Nonfiction

Working with nonfiction enriches readers' advisory and offers your readers more

By Neal Wyatt -- Library Journal, 2/15/2007

Looking for new ways to think about books? Eager to merchandize your entire collection? Then try nonfiction readers' advisory (RA), the hot new area of RA work. It won't feel totally unfamiliar—fiction RA provides a strong base to build upon—but it expands on the broad and adaptive framework of appeal to embrace intriguing new considerations like narrative structure, subject, and type. Yes, there's new vocabulary to learn, but it's definitely worth the effort—and it can actually simplify your work. Once you start working with nonfiction, you'll open a whole new world of possibilities. And you'll never look at your services or your collection the same way again. To get started, consider these four new concepts of nonfiction RA: narrative, appeal, subject, and type.

The power of narrative

Readers often think of nonfiction as an information experience and not as a story experience, and indeed many nonfiction titles are task oriented, teaching readers how to knit or outlining the process of building a fence. But there is a huge body of nonfiction that is both informative and story-based. New nonfiction classics like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (Anchor: Doubleday), Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (HarperPerennial), and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (Penguin) remind us that story is not something that is made up so much as something that is presented in a certain way. The techniques of narrative storytelling such as character, plot, setting, scene, and dialog can be employed in a nonfiction work as well as a fictional one. The degree to which they are employed creates one of the baseline elements of nonfiction RA.

Identifying and understanding the narrative nature of a title is, therefore, key. In nonfiction, narrative exists on a continuum, ranging from highly narrative works, such as Black Hawk Down on one end, to less narrative works, such as Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (Norton) on the other. Readers who like stirring narrative elements such as plotting, character, dialog, and scene will likely enjoy works on Bowden's end of the continuum; works like Greene's will be appreciated by readers who prefer complex story lines, elegant language, and the exploration of theories through their reading.

The nitty-gritty of appeal

Traditionally, RA work has been based on the concept of appeal. Using such elements as pacing, characterization, story line, tone, level of detail, and importance of language and setting, RA librarians can pinpoint what a reader enjoyed about a book and suggest titles with similar appeal.

While the adaptive nature of appeal makes considerations of fiction and nonfiction titles similar, there are three areas in nonfiction where appeal is either used differently or reinvented altogether. Detail in fiction is usually meant to represent the richness and depth of the elements that bring the book to life. For example, consider the information about Egyptology in Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series (Morrow) or the elements of art, religion, and myth that so fascinated readers of The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday). In nonfiction, detail includes those elements as well, but it is expanded to take into account the presence of illustrations, charts, maps, footnotes, bibliographies, and other visual and textual elements that amplify the text.

Nonfiction authors employ detail in different ways. Some writers use detail to help aid reader understanding. For example, the charts, formulas, and proofs contained within Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (Knopf) actually help readers read the book as they provide visual explanations of the difficult written concepts. Other writers use detail elements to immerse the reader in the world of the book. Readers tend to visualize what they are reading, but when it comes to real life, they want to see it. Caroline Alexander's The Endurance (Knopf) overflows with maps, photographs, and excerpts from the papers of members of the expedition to help readers feel more a part of the story. Still other authors use detail elements to expand upon the information provided in their story and allow readers to explore beyond the pages of the book. For example, the explanatory notes and further reading lists that can be found in books such as Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (Penguin) help readers follow threads of interest and find out more about topics related to the book they are reading. Detail elements such as these not only enrich the reading experience, they support the use of the whole collection and allow both reader and librarian to chart connections among titles.

Tone is another standard appeal element that needs to be expanded when working with nonfiction. RA librarians are accustomed to thinking of fiction as cozy, edgy, funny, or bleak, but nonfiction titles are often argumentative, investigative, journalistic, or have a popular or scholarly tone. Nonfiction can be cozy or funny as well, but writers often employ a tone that is different from fiction. For example, while Molly O'Neill's Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Scribner) is warm and cozy and David Sedaris is always a riot, there is a unique journalistic tone found in Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf), and there is a scholarly tone in Sean B. Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo (Norton). These tonal differences in much of nonfiction are important considerations. Very often tone can be the determining factor in a reader's enjoyment of a title.

There is an appeal factor that is new in working with nonfiction. In considering why readers enjoy nonfiction, a clear factor is its particular role to either educate or share an experience. While most readers, of fiction and nonfiction alike, gain pleasure in the learning and/or sharing of the experience they derive from books, it is fundamental to nonfiction that readers read to learn or closely relate to the perspective of the author and that the author writes with that in mind. Therefore, the additional appeal element of learning/experiencing needs to be considered. For example, David McCullough, Stephen Ambrose, and Nathaniel Philbrick are such popular nonfiction authors in part because their books teach a great deal about history in an accessible way. Part of their overt intention is to teach, and part of the reason fans read their work is to learn. Similarly, much of the enjoyment readers gain from nonfiction travel tales, such as Jason Elliot's Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran (St. Martin's), is the opportunity to reexperience the journey a writer takes. Likewise, many readers are drawn to memoirs such as Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random) by the opportunity to share the encounters they convey. This new appeal element can be applied to fiction as well as nonfiction, helping expand the ways readers' advisors can think about books.

The significance of subject

With fiction RA work, librarians have been taught to make a clear distinction between subject and appeal. Subject is traditionally thought to be less important than appeal elements such as pace, character, story line, and frame, which determine a reader's reaction to a title. Comparing Mary Stewart's and Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian sagas illustrates the point. Stewart writes in a lyrical and mythic style, and her story of King Arthur is both historically and linguistically rich. In contrast, Cornwell's take is forceful, war-based, and graphic. Fans of Stewart often find Cornwell too overt and focused on aspects of the story they do not enjoy, while fans of Cornwell can find Stewart too leisurely and diffuse.

However, while the determination not to rely upon subject to match reader to book has underpinned much of RA theory, with nonfiction, subject is very important. It is often the subject that draws a reader to a title and creates interest in other titles. Technically, there are as many possible subjects as writers with ideas, but because RA librarians need to control their collections in a mental framework that allows them to classify books into categories, it is useful to delineate broad classifications of popular nonfiction subjects, including arts, business/economics, food, history, humor, microhistory, military works, politics, religion/inspiration, science (including nature writing), social science, sports, travel, true adventure, and true crime.

Each subject contains various types of writing that capture particular approaches. Many subjects have their own unique divisions of type; for example, true adventure includes books that recount historical treks as well as titles on modern-day adventures and catastrophes. In addition, many nonfiction subjects share several types, including investigations, biographies, memoirs, essays, and explanations. While it's not exactly the same, type acts in nonfiction as subgenre does in fiction to help RA librarians focus more tightly on what a reader enjoyed. For example, those who like historical adventures can read within the type and try Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World (Carroll & Graf) or Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars (Harvest Bks). Readers can also explore across subject, but within the same type, to discover the pleasures of essays, for example, by reading Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist (Doubleday) or Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (Random).

Working with nonfiction

The introduction of new terms and concepts might make RA librarians believe that adding nonfiction into their suggestions makes RA work more difficult, but actually it makes it easier. This is because using nonfiction supports the concept of whole collection RA work. (See “Reading Maps Remake RA,” LJ 11/1/06, p. 38, for a more complete discussion of this concept.) With the entire collection open for the potential to make connections among books, finding titles readers will enjoy becomes much easier.

The easiest way to work with nonfiction is to incorporate it as background for fiction suggestions. If a reader loves Philippa Gregory's The Boleyn Inheritance (Touchstone: S. & S.), why not suggest Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Grove) as supplementary reading? Even if a reader only dips into the sections that support her interests, she will know that you are able to suggest a wider range of titles than previously thought, enriching her fiction reading choices. Mixing fiction with nonfiction expands how readers think about the library, the collection, and your services. It also allows you to work with nonfiction without worrying so much about narrative nature, type, or appeal. If a book is being used as parallel reading, then the reader takes from it what he or she wants and does not need or expect a direct read-alike experience.

Matching fiction with nonfiction is an excellent way to work with readers, and build nonfiction RA skills, but finding pairings between nonfiction titles is also important. With each nonfiction title, consider the four elements of nonfiction:

• Where does the book fall on the narrative continuum? Is it highly narrative and reads similarly to fiction, is it a mix of strongly narrative moments with periods of fact-based prose, or is it highly fact-based with little or no narrative elements?
• What is the subject of the book?
• What appeal elements are present in the book?
• What type of book is it?

These elements act in concert with one another. Type and subject affect tone; the narrative nature of a title directly affects every appeal element even as appeal factors help create the narrative nature of a title; and subject, as expected, helps to determine type. Intertwining these relationships creates a pattern that allows librarians to connect nonfiction titles, not just to one another but to the whole collection.

Once you can translate a title into the RA elements of nonfiction, you can work with a reader to find out what he or she enjoys and suggest other titles. For example, Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love (Penguin) is strongly narrative; has a medium pace; a reflective, comforting, and funny tone; and is about a woman finding her place in life. It is also detail rich, uses language well, and has a strong sense of place. Readers who enjoyed it may also enjoy Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery's Dear Exile (Vintage)—it shares the same tone and also tells the story of women trying to find their place in the world, describes setting well, and is character-rich.

Developing nonfiction RA skills allows librarians to mine the richness of their whole collection, enhance and build new RA skills, and offer readers a wider range of titles based upon what they like to read. With just these four new ways to consider nonfiction, you can make endless connections for your patrons. Too many readers enjoy nonfiction for us not to take up the challenge to serve them well, and there are too many wonderful nonfiction titles for us to leave them languishing in the stacks. So, the next time a reader asks you to suggest something good to read, consider offering some nonfiction titles and see what develops.