Any good follower of my column should know that, despite my highly refined tastes, I am a reader who's too easy to please. I've mentioned before that even the back of cereal boxes fascinate me, and I don't just mean the really cool ones like Wheaties; I'm talking the off-off brand Marshmallow Mateys that don't merit a cardboard box. When you're still interested in what's on the back of a plastic bag there is nowhere to go but up.
Unfortunately, the rest of you lot are probably a bit more selective in your reading material. With the options of just about any other type of entertainment at your fingertips, I don't blame you. I think it is a shame that reruns of ""Jersey Shore"" probably get more views in a week than half of the books that have come out in the last six months do.
In my well-meaning but generally futile search to get someone on campus to pick up a bit of non-required reading, I thought: Why not take a page out of this so-called ""reality"" TV show world and give non-fiction a gander?
Now, I'll admit, despite being a groupie of the written word, I'm not the biggest fan of books on reality. I generally cannot make it through a layman's book about science to save my life. I usually shut memoirs halfway through wondering why people are so whiny these days. Even reputedly ""fun"" nonfiction books lose my interest fairly quickly. But for the sake of you, my reading populace, I thought I'd give them another shot.
For science, Bill Bryson's ""A Short History of Nearly Everything"" was easy enough and held my attention, despite its door-stopping length of over 600 pages. Frightening to look at, not so bad to actually read. He's even got a version for kids, ""A Very Short History of Nearly Everything,"" for those of you who still need pictures in your light reading.
Looking for something a bit more specifically scientific, I found ""Alex's Adventures in Numberland,"" by Alex Bellos, which explores how and why people understand math—quite exciting, though that may have been because of the author's fantastic first name.
In my search for appealing memoirs, I came across the fairly singular ""Orange is the New Black."" Piper Kerman's record explores her experience as a middle-class bohemian doing time for a forgotten college misdemeanor. If law-breaking females aren't interesting enough, there is always the old standby of David Sedaris' short accounts of his hilarious life. ""Me Talk Pretty One Day"" had me bursting into giggles at inappropriate times for weeks.
If laughing until milk spurts out your nose at breakfast doesn't sound like your cup of tea, there's always the mostly real account of Dave Eggers raising his younger brother in ""A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."" It's even got drawings in it for you visual people.
Last but not least, ""The Animal Review"" by Jake Lentz and Steve Nash, a nonfiction book about something everybody I know already does in their free time anyway: Rating every animal by how totally awesome it is. I mean, who hasn't already given the Great White Shark an A+ in their head right now? Seriously. With a book that awesome you can't ignore nonfiction anymore.
Has Alex resurrected yet another genre, or should reality in books stay buried? Air your grievances at kuskowski@wisc.edu.
