This is my signup post for Shelleyrae’s 2026 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. Check out the announcement post on her blog, Book’d Out, for details. Note that you do not need a blog to participate. Official hashtag: #ReadNonFicChal
The challenge has various goal levels. I’m opting for the Nonfiction Grazer: “Read & review any nonfiction book. Set your own goal, or none at all, just share the nonfiction you read through the year.”
My goal will be to read AND REVIEW 12 biographies or history-related books.
Why Take the Nonfiction Reader Challenge?
I already typically read a good amount of nonfiction. What’s drawn me to this challenge is connecting with other nonfiction readers and actually writing about the books I read. I’ve fallen off from connecting with other bloggers and also writing about what I read. I miss both!
In my early days of book blogging, I wrote about every book I read. I fell away from doing that some years ago, but continued to write in my reading journal, a practice I had started years before blogging. That, too, however, has grown inconsistent in recent years. I started blogging in 2010, and since then I’ve moved to a new state, started a podcast, renovated a house, and earned my MLIS degree — all pretty big projects!
My intention is not to get back to how I used to blog, but I do want to think more deeply about what I read. When I don’t write about a book, it doesn’t stick with me as much. Writing down my thoughts about a book helps me think more clearly about its concepts, arguments, and structure. I make connections I wouldn’t otherwise make, both within the work itself and to other books and/or life situations. Writing about a book clarifies what I’ve learned and helps me remember key points. It is also helpful to have a thoughtful post about a book to refer back to months or years later.
Nonfiction that I read in 2025
Although I’m mentally putting together a stack of potential books to read for the 2026 Nonfiction Reader Challenge, I won’t make a formal list. I will take this opportunity to list and briefly recap the nonfiction I read in 2025.
Loved These
- After Lives: A Poignant Memoir Collection That Examines Biographies as a Genre, Reflect on Life’s Lessons Through Compelling Stories by Megan Marshall (2025). I’m a fan of Marshall’s biographies. She’s written three biographies that have won prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer. In After Lives, Marshall reflects on influences from her earlier years, the impact of her partner’s death, and shares discoveries she made after her biographies were published. It was fascinating to read how they continue to live on through connections with people and material objects. It was a privilege to interview Marshall on the Book Cougars.
- Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon by Sara Catterall (2025). This is a deeply researched and engaging biography of a woman whose name is associated with the women’s “pants” that she popularized, but whose lifelong reform work in other areas has been overlooked. Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894) was “more representative of her time” than some of the big names we remember today, like Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She can be a model for people today who can’t/won’t make a living as activists but who keep agitating for their cause(s). Bloomer worked as a teacher, postmaster, and writer and owned her own newspaper, The Lily, an essential outlet for information on the causes she cared about, such as temperance, suffrage, and women’s rights. It was the first newspaper by and for women. Bloomer gave speeches and served on committees in local and national organizations from New York to Iowa.
- Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra (2024). I first heard of Isabella Stewart Gardner when I was in library school at Simmons University. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is right next door to Simmons in Boston. It is perhaps the most unique museum I’ve ever visited. Reading about Gardner’s life and how she created her masterpiece of a museum, which is an ongoing gift to the world, was a reading highlight of the year. Gardner was a complex woman who rubbed shoulders with many well-known people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a thrill to talk with Dykstra about her biography and Gardner’s museum on the Book Cougars.
- Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America–The Biography of Gilded Age Muckraking and Defending Democracy by Stephanie Gorton (2020). This book focuses on McClure, Tarbell, and a few other journalists during the magazine’s rise, its heyday, and its fall. Gorton touches on McClure and Tarbell’s younger years and their lives after the magazine, but the bulk of the book focuses on “1893 to the cataclysmic staff walkout in 1906.” The mess Willa Cather must have landed in when she arrived as editor in 1906! Tarbell was a pioneer of investigative journalism. Her research on the business practices of the Standard Oil Company astounded lay readers by showing how the company crushed competition and livelihoods, and outraged wealthy businessmen and politicians for revealing not the company’s abuses but, get this, how to get rich. Trump’s rants about “fake news” echo Roosevelt’s against muckraking.
- Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman (2013). This book was pure joy to read! I loved learning more about Bly, whom I’d read about before, and being introduced to Bisland. These two women did not know they were racing one another around the world, at least not initially. Goodman brings the reader into their world and teaches so much about the time period that you almost feel like you’re there. Or wish you were. The telegraph, steamships, and long-distance trains were new in 1889. The British Empire was thriving practically everywhere that Bly and Bisland traveled. Goodman provides some background on Bly and Bisland’s childhoods and early years, but the bulk of the story focuses on how they approached their work (writing and, in this case, travel) and on what their lives were like after the race ended.
- A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan (2023). I listened to this on a road trip, driving through the very heartland Egan wrote about. Egan tells a gripping story of the KKK’s spread in the 1920s and how D.C. Stephenson took control of it. The subtitle is misleading. It sounds like a woman was actively working to stop the KKK. The brutal rape and torture of Madge Oberholtzer by Stephenson did lead to his downfall, but in a much different way than the subtitle implies. Egan speculates that the popularity of the KKK ended not because of changing social mores, but perhaps because they accomplished their goals, such as stopping the immigration of certain people they did not like. The parallels to today’s political environment are evident.
- Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney (2025). This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and it did not disappoint! If you’re a Jane Austen fan or a literary history enthusiast, you don’t want to miss this one. This book is part memoir about how Romney got into the rare book trade, what that work is like, how her reading tastes have developed, and how she tracked down the books and biographies of the women writers Jane Austen read. These are writers that literary historians have dismissed as hacks, not worth our time. Romney begs to differ. She made me want to read all of these writers (well, there’s one I might skip). We were excited to have Romney on the Book Cougars to talk about this unique work.
- The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin (2025). A fascinating look at how Anne Frank’s diary came to be, from its impetus, to her writing and self-editing, its eventual journey to publication, and how people in subsequent generations have been inspired by and use Frank’s Diary. I had been taught that Frank’s father edited his daughter’s work to make himself sound better, but Franklin clears up that misconception. Franklin also writes about Frank’s life before, during, and after they were betrayed, and what her life was probably like in the concentration camps in which she was imprisoned. We were honored to have Franklin on the Book Cougars to talk about this new work; we also spoke with her about her previous biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.
- Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro (2019). This was a re-read for me. Caro reads Working and was the perfect companion on a road trip. He writes about his research and writing process, sharing stories from his earliest years as a writer to more recent anecdotes. One that stuck with me is that when Caro was first working on The Power Broker, his friends, most of whom were in journalism, were incredulous that he had been working on the book for years. As a reporter, Caro was known as a fast writer. Stories got churned out in a few days or hours, sometimes right on the spot. He started feeling bad about how long the biography was taking. Then, as he began meeting other biographers and historians who were also taking years or decades to write their books, he knew he was on the right track.
Enjoyed these
- 107 Days by Kamala Harris (2025). Harris presents a day-by-day overview of what it was like inside her 2024 presidential campaign. It’s a fast read and brought back the sense of hope her campaign raised among liberals and progressives.
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sara Wynn-Williams (2025). Wynn-Williams was in on Facebook’s early days as it rose to international power. What she initially saw as a tool to help the world all too quickly became a tool of political manipulation with devastating and deadly results, both internationally and right here in the U.S., where Facebook helped Trump win his first presidential election. It places responsibility squarely on Zuckerberg and his leadership team.
- Deep Work: Rules and Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016) and Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (2024) by Cal Newport. I enjoy Newport’s podcast, Deep Questions, and have benefited from some of his ideas about distractions and project/life planning.
- The Great Gatsby at 100 by Sheila Liming (2025). This is a series of six lectures on various aspects of The Great Gatsby: Economics, Class, Gender, Sex, Fashion, and Jazz. I enjoyed listening to this on a road trip. Unfortunately, it is only available on Audible.
- How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith by Mariann Edgar Budde (2025). Inspiring, calming, and hopeful.
- The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President by Eden Collinsworth (2025). What a wild, wild life Woodhull lived! Her parents were abusive con artists who used their two daughters to make money as clairvoyants and may have exploited them sexually. Woodhull made and lost several fortunes as a clairvoyant, a Wall Street broker, through marriage, and as a newspaper owner. She rubbed shoulders with prominent people of her day, including Henry Ward Beecher, Frederick Douglass, and Karl Marx. She was imprisoned, divorced, and did indeed run for president of the U.S.
- Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings (2025), edited by Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall. This was another of my most anticipated releases of 2025. I loved some of Fuller’s writings, liked some, and was definitely challenged/frustrated by some of her work. Thankfully, I read this 900+ page book with a group of friends over the summer. It was rewarding, but this first reading is just the tip of the iceberg with Fuller. She was so smart, widely and well-read, and such a dense writer. Both her style and content were challenging at times. Included in this edition are Fuller’s two books, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 and Women in the Nineteenth Century, her published journalism, unpublished works, letters, and journal entries. It is a fantastic and thorough introduction to Fuller. I will no doubt revisit this work.
Finished These
- The Book of Shadow Work by Keila Shaheen
- The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul
- Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro.
- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
There were also a handful of nonfiction books that I DNF’d (Did Not Finish). I don’t feel the need to complete every book I start. If I read the first few pages, I usually end up giving a book 50 pages or so, depending on its size and what factors have kept me reading so far, before DNFing. Sure, there are some classics or challenging books that I will struggle through for whatever reason (e.g., Margaret Fuller). But sometimes a book turns out not to be what I was looking for at the time, or the cons of continuing outweigh the pros.
How about you? Do you read much nonfiction? Do you have a favorite sub-genre of nonfiction that you gravitate toward or a favorite book you’d like to recommend?