2023 In Review: My Favorite Nonfiction

Sorry this is a few days late but these are my favorite nonfiction books I read in 2023. Almost all of these came from my small town library or were Kindle editions I borrowed through Overdrive.

My Favorites of 2023

• The Good Assassin: How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia by Stephan Talty (2020)
• Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski (2023)
• A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa (2012)
• In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (2015)
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World without World War I by Richard Ned Lebow (2014)
• How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter (2022)
• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (2015)
• I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger by Frank Wynne (2006)
• Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road by Rob Schmitz (2016)
• On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (2012)
• The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman (2015)

Honorable Mentions

• The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family by Josh Hanagarne (2013)
• Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi (2008)
• Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life by Amber Scorah (2019)
• Lost Boy by Brent W. Jeffs with Maia Szalavitz (2009)
• What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank (2004)
• The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick (2017)

Nonfiction November 2023: My Year in Nonfiction

I don’t know about you, but Nonfiction November definitely snuck up on me this year. Fortunately, Rebekah’s recent kick-off post on her blog She Seeks Nonfiction confirmed my suspicions it was around the corner and helped put me in the needed mindset. With a modest atmospheric river dumping rain in my area I might as well stay inside my cabin and crank out a post for Nonfiction November 2023.

This year our host for Week 1 is Heather of Based on a True Story.  Following in the footsteps of previous hosts she gets the ball rolling by asking us a few little questions.

Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

My Favorites (so far) of 2023

• The Good Assassin: How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia by Stephan Talty (2020)
• Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski (2023)
• A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa (2012)
• In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (2015)
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World without World War I by Richard Ned Lebow (2014)
• How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter (2022)
• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (2015)
• I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger by Frank Wynne (2006)
• Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road by Rob Schmitz (2016)
• On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (2012)

Reviewing the nonfiction I’ve read this year I noticed a few things. So far in 2023 I’ve read a diverse array of memoirs including those by Iranians, individuals who’ve left high-control religious communities and Holocaust survivors. Other areas of interest were politics, mid 20th century European history and on the ground reporting.

Iranian Memoirs

• We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran by Aria Minu-Sepehr (2012)
• Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi (2008)
• My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan (2007)

Leaving High-Control Religious Communities Memoirs

• Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life by Amber Scorah (2019)
• Lost Boy by Brent W. Jeffs with Maia Szalavitz (2009)
• The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family by Josh Hanagarne (2013) – Please note: Hanagarne’s memoir mainly focusses upon his lifelong struggle with Tourette Syndrome. In the end he does leave the LDS (Mormon) church but his departure is amicable and holds the institution and its members in high esteem.

Holocaust Survivor Memoirs 

• Stolen Years by Sara Zyskind (1977)
• Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici (1998)

Politics

• What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank (2004)
• How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter (2022)
• The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick (2017)

Mid 20th Century European History

• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (2015)
• I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger by Frank Wynne (2006)
• The Good Assassin: How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia by Stephan Talty (2020)
• On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (2012)

On the Ground Reporting

• Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road by Rob Schmitz (2016)
• Falling off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization by Alex Perry (2008)
• Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure by Christopher S. Stewart (2013)
• Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan (2017)

To hopefully answer Heather’s last two questions for the rest of the year and well beyond I’m planning on reading even more books about 20th century European history, Iran and people exiting oppressive religious communities. As for what I’d like to get out of this year’s Nonfiction November my goals remains the same year after year. I wanna come away with great book recommendations, discover new book blogs, and maybe even pick up an additional subscriber or two.

Library Loot: Historical Fiction Edition

Same old story. Dropped some books off at the library and returned the next day to borrow a few more. For some reason I found myself craving a little historical fiction and figured these might do the trick. Keeping my fingers crossed I’ll be able to apply all four novels towards Introverted Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge and with a little luck one or two of them towards Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and the Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge hosted by Carol’s Notebook. 

• The Vienna Writers Circle by J.C. Maetis (2023) – A little something to represent Austria for the Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge. I’ll be reading this in conjunction with Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War. 
• Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr (2018) – After enjoying Prague Fatale back in 2019 I’ve been wanting to read more from Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series. Hoping to apply this one to all three of the above-mentioned reading challenges.
• The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali (2019) – Set in Iran during the 1950s I’m thinking this will make a nice follow-up read to Azar Nafisi’s memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About.
• The Hittite by Ben Bova (2010) – Perhaps it’s time I read a little historical fiction set in the ancient world. I’m curious to learn how Bova, a science fiction writer approaches the historical fiction genre. 

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading to encourage bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write-up your post, steal the Library Loot icon and link your post using the Mr. Linky on Claire’s blog. 

20 Books of Summer: The Increment by David Ignatius

Last month Jeff Stein, the host of one of my favorite podcasts Spy Talk interviewed Washington Post journalist and best-selling novelist David Ignatius who happened to be promoting his new thriller The Tao of Deception, which like the old feuilletons of the 19th century was recently serialized in the The Washington Post. While I knew Ignatius was a journalist I learned thanks to the podcast he’d written a number of espionage thrillers. Impressed by what I’d heard I vowed to look for his fiction the next time I visited the public library. During one of those recent visits I discovered several of his novels, including one set in Iran. Since I’m doing research on that Middle Eastern country I helped myself to a copy of 2009 spy thriller The Increment. I’m happy to say I enjoyed the novel and look forward to reading more of his stuff.

One day an up and coming young Iranian scientist serving in his country’s convert nuclear weapons program, disillusioned with Iran’s corrupt autocratic authorities becomes a “virtual walk-in” (VWI) by sending an unsolicited email message to the CIA’s website offering to supply top secret information. To CIA Chief of Iran Operations Division Harry Pappas this could end up being the greatest intelligence coup in decades, but only if he can determine if the mysterious “Dr. Ali” really exists and is not a creation of Iranian intelligence. Even so, Pappas must earn the scientist’s confidence and begin the tricky process of transforming him into an American asset.

In order to pull this off Pappas enlists not only his most trusted CIA colleagues but also turns to an old friend in British MI 6. By going behind the backs of his superiors Pappas will be breaching agency protocol, and if exposed could result in espionage charges for conspiring with a foreign, albeit friendly intelligence service. Complicating all of this is a sense of urgency as hawkish elements with the American intelligence community and White House are hell-bent on attacking Iran in hopes of derailing its nuclear weapons program. After losing his son to an IED attack in war-torn Iraq Pappas has vowed to never let the US invade another county under false pretenses, and hopes the intelligence his secretive source can provide will prevent another needless war.

The Increment is a lot of fun, and like I said earlier it’s left me wanting to explore the rest of Ignatius’s fiction. Therefore don’t be surprised when you see more spy thrillers by Ignatius featured on my blog.

20 Books of Summer: Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi

Considering my weakness for Iranian writers it’s hard to believe I’ve never read anything by Azar Nafisi, let alone her 2003 bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. Thinking it was high time I did something about it I recently borrowed  a copy of her 2008 follow-up memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About from my small town public library as part of my research project on Iranian politics. Even though much of her memoir is devoted in no small part to decades of family drama, there’s lots on the Iranian Revolution and the oppressive theocratic regime it spawned.

Rumi once proclaimed a person who exhibits both positive and negative qualities, strengths and weaknesses is not flawed, but complete. If that’s the case then the personalities, mainly loved ones and other relatives who populate her memoir are some of the most complete individuals ever to walk the earth. Considering Nafisi doesn’t even mention the Iranian Revolution until 200 or so pages into the book allows her plenty of opportunities to regale us with these peoples’ foibles.

In the end it was worth it. While there’s an abundance of family drama I appreciated her recollection of the pivotal events leading up to the Iranian Revolution, how it unfolded and above all the oppressive regime that emerged. Nafisi recalls multitudes marching in the streets demanding the Shah step down while no-one had the slightest clue the Ayatollah Khomeini and his like-minded followers could be a danger the country. Like the Russian and French revolutions that preceded it, the Iranian Revolution quickly devoured its own children as former critics of the Shah, revolutionaries and moderate clerics were purged and murdered. By the time the new regime morphed into a theocratic dictatorship the likes of the world had never seen it was too late. Even the most modest freedoms Nafisi and her fellow Iranians enjoyed under the shah were now gone, never to return.

After reading Things I’ve Been Silent About I hope to follow it up her preceding memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. Her 2003 runaway hit has been sitting ignored and unread in my personal library for well over a decade. Time to finally read it.

Book Beginnings: The Increment by David Ignatius

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Imagine a gaudy boulevard descending a hill, like a swath of icing dripping down the inside of a coarse earthen bowl. The broad street is lined with department stores and little shops; it pulses with neon signs shouting the brand names of cell phones and airlines and fast-food restaurants. But the commercial thoroughfare is grimly punctuated every few blocks with hand-painted banners commemorating the blood of the martyrs. .
    This is Vali Asr Avenue, the spine of North Tehran.

Last week I featured  Roxana Saberi’s memoir 2010 Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran. The week before it was Reading Lolita in Tehran author Azar Nafisi’s 2008 memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About. In what’s shaping up to be a series of Iran-themed Book Beginnings this week it’s David Ignatius’s 2009 spy thriller The Increment. 

 Once I find myself deviating from my original 20 Books of Summer with yet another book about Iran. I grabbed this book from the public library because I’m doing research on Iran for a possible up-coming op-ed piece and also because I recently enjoyed hearing Ignatius interviewed on Spy Talk, one of my favorite podcasts. Like I mentioned last week there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing more books about Iran, or memoirs by Iranian authors featured on my blog. Here’s what Amazon has to say about David Ignatius’s The Increment.

From a hidden enclave in the maze of Tehran, an Iranian scientist who calls himself “Dr. Ali” sends an encrypted message to the CIA. It falls to Harry Pappas to decide if it’s for real. Dr. Ali sends more secrets of the Iranian bomb program to the agency, then panics. He’s being followed, but he doesn’t know who’s onto him, and neither does Pappas. The White House is no help―they’re looking for a pretext to attack Tehran.

To get his agent out, Pappas turns to a secret British spy team known as “The Increment,” whose operatives carry the modern version of the double-O “license to kill.” But the real story here is infinitely more complicated than he understands, and to get to the bottom of it he must betray his own country.

Book Beginnings: Between Two Worlds by Roxana Saberi

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

This book aims to convey what I experienced in Iran, particularly during my one hundred days in Evin Prison in 2009, when I saw the dark and bright sides of human nature, including my own. I hope this account can also help shed light on events unfolding in Iran, where many people have gone through similar or much more difficult ordeals, but few have been free to speak of them.

Last week I featured Reading Lolita in Tehran author Azar Nafisi’s 2008 memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About. The week before it was Jenny White’s 2010 historical thriller The Winter Thief. This week it’s another Iranian memoir, this time Roxana Saberi’s 2010 Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran. 

 Once I find myself deviating from my original 20 Books of Summer with yet another Iranian memoir. Since I’m doing research on Iran for a op-ed piece I’d like to write someday there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing more books about Iran, or memoirs by Iranian authors featured on my blog. Here’s what Amazon has to say about Saberi’s Between Two Worlds.

On the morning of January 31, 2009, Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist working in Iran, was forced from her home by four men and secretly detained in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. The intelligence agents who captured her accused her of espionage—a charge she denied. For several days, Saberi was held in solitary confinement, ruthlessly interrogated, and cut off from the outside world. For weeks, neither her family nor her friends knew her whereabouts.

After a sham trial that made headlines around the world, the thirty-one-year-old reporter was sentenced to eight years in prison. But following international pressure by family, friends, colleagues, various governments, and total strangers, she was released on appeal on May 11, 2009. Now Saberi breaks her silence to share the full account of her ordeal, describing in vivid detail the methods that Iranian hard-liners are using to try to intimidate and control many of the country’s people.

Book Beginnings: Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses. My father cheated on my mother to have a happy family life. I felt sorry for him, and in one sense took it upon myself to fill the empty spaces in his life. I collected his poems, listened to his woes, and helped him choose appropriate gifts, first for my mother and then for the women he fell in love with. He later claimed that most of his relations with these other women were not sexual, that what he yearned for was the feeling they gave him of warmth and approval. Approval! My parents taught me how deadly that desire could be.

Last week I featured Jenny White’s 2010 historical thriller The Winter Thief. The week before it was George Clark’s 1962 Early Modern Europe: From About 1450 to About 1720. This week it’s Reading Lolita in Tehran author Azar Nafisi’s 2008 memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About. 

 Once again right out the gate I find myself deviating from my original 20 Books of Summer with yet another book from my public library. Considering my weakness for Iranian memoirs I guess this shouldn’t come to anyone including myself as a huge surprise. Here’s what Amazon has to say about Nafisi’s Things I’ve Been Silent About.

Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets; a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval–these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place” (Newsday).

Library Loot

After returning Schoschana Rabinovici’s Thanks to My Mother to the library yesterday I couldn’t resist borrowing a few more books. Two are by women who left the Middle East only to return to their respective native counties. The other tells the story of a forgotten political scandal. I’ll be applying all three towards Book’d Out’s Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

• Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House by Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz (2020) – I’ve been wanting to listen to this podcast about the high crimes and misdemeanors of Vice President Spiro Agnew for awhile now, but before I do I think I’ll read the book. 
• Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family by Tamara Chalabi (2011) – Been itching to the read this for over a decade but never made a serious effort until now. 
• Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni (2009) – Another Middle Eastern memoir I’ve been wanting to read. I’d planned on reading her previous book Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran before this one but I’ll give Honeymoon in Tehran a try first. 

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading to encourage bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write-up your post, steal the Library Loot icon and link your post using the Mr. Linky on Claire’s blog  

Book Beginnings: My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

I took my first steps amid the ancient ruins and oil fields of Solomon’s Mosque in Iran. It was the fall of 1964 when my family left the urban bustle of San Francisco and touched down in a tiny airport.   

Last week I featured the 2011 mystery 1222 by Norwegian author and former Justice Minister Anne Holt. The week before it was Lily King’s 2014 historical novel Euphoria. This week it’s the 2007 memoir My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan. 

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of Iranian memoirs. Like a number of books I’ve been featuring of late I came across Ardalan’s memoir because an anonymous librarian prominently displayed the library book in hopes it would get noticed. Here’s what Amazon has to say about My Name Is Iran. 

A century of family tales from two beloved but divided homelands, Iran and America.

Drawing on her remarkable personal history, NPR producer Davar Ardalan brings us the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution. Her American grandmother’s love affair with an Iranian physician took her from New York to Iran in 1931. Ardalan herself moved from San Francsico to rural Iran in 1964 with her Iranian American parents who barely spoke Farsi. After her parents’ divorce, Ardalan joined her father in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he had gone to make a new life; however improbably, after high school, Ardalan decided to move back to an Islamic Iran. When she arrived, she discovered a world she hardly recognized, and one which demands a near-complete renunciation of the freedoms she experienced in the West. In time, she and her young family make the opposite migration and discover the difficulties, however paradoxical, inherent in living a free life in America.