Nonfiction November: Fiction and Nonfiction Pairing

This week Nonfiction November is hosted by Sarah's Book Shelves that features non-fiction and fiction pairings.  

I can't count the number of times I've been reading a book and automatically come up with a list of books on the same topic that could be paired together. Sometimes it's fiction paired with non-fiction, although I'm sure some of the time it's fiction paired together or non-fiction paired together.  

So, this topic should have been super easy for me to write about. And yet, I've thought about it for a few days and kept coming up with nothing.  Nothing. At. All.

Finally this morning while listening to a podcast on my way to work a few ideas started rumbling around in my brain.  If given enough time I know I could find many more pairings to share, but this is what I've come up with on a cold Tuesday morning:

The Astronaut's Wives Club by Lilly Koppel (fiction) and Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger (non-fiction) - as an adult I am loving books about the space program, but as a child who was supposed to learn about it in sixth grade science, I did a great job of reading a book under my desk while we round-robin read. I would peek up when it was my turn to read, but otherwise, I missed almost all of that unit.  The Astronaut Wives club is one of those books that I loved because I found out the story behind the men who were in the space program.  And their lives were so interesting.  Apollo 8 is a non-fiction look at a space mission, which I also devoured.  

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult (fiction) and Columbine by Dave Eggers (non-fiction) - both of these books focus on a school shooting.  Picoult's novel has the usual (for her) alternating narrators and twist at book's end. Columbine is Eggers account of the tragedy at Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado.  

Bear Town by Fredrik Backman and Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer - Bear Town is a look at a small town, the hockey team that the town roots for, and a scandal that threatens the dreams of some of the players.  Missoula looks at one college town's various issues with sexual assaults and rapes of its female students.  

Fire From the Rock by Sharon M. Draper and A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls - Fire From the Rock is a YA novel about a teenage girl, Sylvia, who is asked to help integrate Central High School. A Mighty Long Way is Walls' true account of attending Central High School as one of the first African American students.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett and The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South by Katherine Van Wormer and David W. Jackson III.  Skeeter, a white socialite in The Help writes the story of the women she knew in her childhood that helped raise her and those that worked for families nearby.  The Maid Narratives is a non-fiction account of the domestic helpers that worked in the South for white families.


I can't wait to see what pairings other bloggers are sharing this week.  I love all the non-fiction posts I've been reading, and have added several to my TBR already.