There is a photo of me in my mid-twenties sitting at the kitchen table reading a book. There are two other books on the table, one open, and my arms are positioned in such a way that I am touching all three books. This would not be untypical for me. In those days, I would stumble upon a topic that interested me and then read everything about it that I could get my hands on. Books, obviously, since back in those days there was no Internet.

I’ve always loved biographies and history and anything that might be categorized as popular science. There was my year or so of reading physics (actual physics, but also a few biographies of Einstein), and from there I moved into mathematics and mathematicians. And I can tell you with some confidence that I have read every biography about Mozart ever printed, because, yes, there was my half-decade of reading (and listening to) Mozart. (Actually I’ve never stopped listening to Mozart. Why would you, really?)

Of course, I can satisfy my curiosity a lot easier these days (because, you know, Google), which is both good and bad—I get answers quickly (because I’m not going to the library or the bookstore, researching, or reading whole books) but my knowledge is not nearly as deep or rich precisely because I am not reading whole books.

And yet … I keep buying them. Something looks interesting in a review. Someone mentions a title, says it was really good. I find a book I remember from long ago on the remainder pile. You know how that goes. About fifteen months ago I took a look at the shelf that houses my TBR books and noticed that I had a lot of unread nonfiction. Way out of proportion to my reading habits.

Because, let’s face it, I love fiction. (And I love editing fiction, too, although I also work on plenty of nonfiction.) I definitely read more novels than not. Here’s my fiction-to-nonfiction breakdown for the seven years preceding 2014:

2007 – 31 / 7
2008 – 27 / 9
2009 – 28 / 13
2010 – 28 / 11
2011 – 33 / 9
2012 – 24 / 8
2013 – 46 / 8

Those numbers, when I checked them, were shocking. What had happened to me? Self-employment had something to do with it; I worked a lot anyway, and then the recession … oh, you know. I also had an undiagnosed medical condition that cut my bedtime reading hours. I was tired all the time and didn’t have the spare bandwidth one needs for nonfiction pursuits. So I relaxed into fiction. (I was treated in the latter half of 2012, and you can see the difference it made in 2013’s overall numbers.)

Until I declared 2014 My Year of Reading Nonfiction.* I went through the shelf and pulled out a lot of titles I’d really intended to get to (sometimes for years). It was an ambitious stack, but I was determined.

Three titles in, I realized I would not survive if I read only nonfiction. (The first book I read in 2014 was Behind the Beautiful Forevers—need I say more?) I need the escape hatch of fiction. So I decided—one shouldn’t set oneself up for failure, after all—I would be happy if I ended up with a one-to-one ratio. And at year’s end I’d read 37 nonfiction titles and 28 fiction titles.

This is the nonfiction I read in 2014:

Diana Athill / Somewhere Towards the End
Diana Athill / Stet: An Editor’s Life
Elizabeth Bard / Lunch in Paris
Julian Barnes / Levels of Life
Jean-Dominique Bauby / The Diving Bell & the Butterfly
Katherine Boo / Behind the Beautiful Forevers
John Bradshaw / Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science …
Susannah Cahalan / Brain on Fire
Paul Collins / The Trouble With Tom
Patrick Comerford / Embracing Difference
Cara De Silva, ed. / In Memory’s Kitchen
Edmund de Waal / The Hare with Amber Eyes
Rachel Held Evans / A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Anne Fadiman / Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Michael Gates Gill / How Starbucks Saved My Life
Hugh Halter / Flesh
Ben Hatch / Are We Nearly There Yet?
Piper Kerman / Orange Is the New Black
James Lasdun / Give Me Everything You Have
Greg Lawrence / Jackie as Editor
F. Ndabatamiye, A. Parker / Frederick
Ann Patchett / Truth and Beauty
William Powers / Hamlet’s BlackBerry
Joe Queenan / One for the Books
Phyllis Rose / The Shelf
Will Schwalbe / The End of Your Life Book Club
David Sedaris / When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Maurice Sendak / Caldecott & Co.
Joshua Wolf Shenk / Powers of Two
Rebecca Skloot / The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Gary Taubes / Why We Get Fat
Barbara Brown Taylor / Learning to Walk in the Dark
Carol Wall / Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening
Patricia J. Williams / Open House
Simon Winchester / Krakatoa
Simon Winchester / The Professor and the Madman
James Wood / How Fiction Works

There’s some history, some memoir, several books about books, a little bit of popular science, humor … Only a couple were duds and most were excellent. A few made me change the way I think, and I especially recommend them to you**:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random House 2012)
“Annawadi sat two hundred yards off the Sahar Airport Road, a stretch where new India collided with old India and made new India late. Chauffeurs in SUVs honked furiously at the bicycle delivery boys peeling off from a slum chicken shop, each carrying a rack of three hundred eggs. Annawadi itself was nothing special, in the context of the slums of Mumbai. Every house was off-kilter, so less off-kilter looked like straight. Sewage and sickness looked like life. … Late at night, the contractors modernizing the airport dumped things in the lake. Annawadians also dumped things there: most recently, the decomposing carcasses of twelve goats. Whatever was in that soup, the pigs and dogs that slept in its shallows emerged with bellies stained blue. Some creatures survived the lake, though, and not only the malarial mosquitoes. As the morning went on, a fisherman waded through the water, one hand pushing aside cigarette packs and blue plastic bags, the other dimpling the surface with a net. He would take his catch to the Marol market to be ground into fish oil, a health product for which demand had surged now that it was valued in the West.”

Cat Sense (Basic Books 2013)
“We must also ask whether the cat is being inadvertently and subtly altered by those who hold cat welfare closest to their hearts. Paradoxically, the drive to neuter as many cats as possible, with its laudable aim of reducing the suffering of unwanted kittens, may be gradually eliminating the characteristics of the very cats best suited to living in harmony with humankind: many of the cats that avoid neutering are those that are most suspicious of people and the best at hunting. The friendliest, most docile cats are nowadays neutered before leaving any descendants, while the wildest, meanest ferals are likely to escape the attention of cat rescuers and breed at will, thus pushing the cat’s evolution away from, rather than toward, better integration with human society. We are in danger of demanding more from our cats than they can deliver. We expect that an animal that has been our pest controller of choice for thousands of years should now give up that lifestyle because we have begun to find its consequences distasteful or unacceptable.”

Hamlet’s Blackberry (HarperCollins 2010)
“There’s always been a conflict between the exterior, social self and the interior, private one. The struggle to reconcile them is central to the human experience, one of the great themes of philosophy, literature, and art. In our own lifetime, the balance has tilted decisively in one direction. We hear the voices of others, and are directed by those voices, rather than by our own. We don’t turn inward as often or as easily as we used to. In one sense, the digital sphere is all about differentiating oneself from others. Anyone with a computer can have a blog now, and the possibilities for self-expression are endless. However, this expression takes place entirely within the digital crowd, which frames and defines it. This makes us more reactive, our thinking contingent on others. … This shift is affecting everyone, including those who are not fully participating in it. This is not a small matter. It’s a struggle that’s taking place at the center of our lives, for control of how we think and feel. When you’re scrambling all the time, that’s what your inner life becomes: scrambled.”

Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperCollins 2014)
“Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound. … While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them … those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most. In this view, the best thing to do when fear has a neck hold on you is to befriend someone who lives in real and constant fear. The best thing to do when you are flattened by despair is to spend time in a community where despair is daily bread. The best thing to do when sadness has your arms twisted behind your back is to sit down with the saddest child you know and say, ‘Tell me about it. I have all day.’ The hardest part about doing any of these things is to do them without insisting that your new teachers make you feel better by acting more cheerful when you are around. After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know. ‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,’ Carl Jung wrote, ‘but by making the darkness conscious.’”

Powers of Two (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014)
“The emotional point needs to be made explicit: Creativity has become a broad, vague term, a kind of stand-in for universal good, even a synonym for happiness (or, as in innovation, for profits). But making new, beautiful, useful things is as much about discord as it is about union. The creative impulse is born of a sense of incompleteness and inadequacy. It’s often fueled by frustration, by an incessant—though perhaps hard to articulate—sense that things are not as they ought to be, or as they could be. Many of us believe that finding one’s partner or soul mate means arriving at a place of consistent satisfaction. But it may be quite the contrary, that a pairing proceeds from an awareness that there is a gulf to cross, and all you have is a dinghy. … But one of the qualities that comes along with strangeness between partners is that they will never fully know each other. … [L]ong-term relationships are always beset by a paradox that human beings want both security and novelty. They want ease and familiarity and they also want to be challenged and aroused.”

The Shelf (Farrar, Straus and Girous 2014)
“Libraries are constantly getting rid of books they have acquired. They have to, or they would run out of space. The polite word for this is “deaccession,” the usual word, “weeding.” … But skeptics of library weeding, like [Nicholson] Baker, are keenly aware of the difference between gardens and libraries: once you’ve weeded out a book, it isn’t going to grow back again. … [At my university library] there were nine thousand [novels on the weed list]. … To my deep sadness, I recognized titles on the list. Their removal from the library was like an actual death, a kind of death I had never imagined. People who feel strongly about retaining books in libraries have a simple way to combat the removal of treasured volumes. Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don’t. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerilla war for physical books.”

Why We Get Fat (Random House 2010)
“The physicians of Bruch’s era [the 1940s and ’50s] weren’t thoughtless and the doctors of today are not, either. They merely have a flawed belief system—a paradigm—that stipulates that the reason we get fat is clear and incontrovertible, as is the cure. We get fat, our physicians tell us, because we eat too much and/or move too little, and so the cure is to do the opposite. … This is what Bruch described in 1957 as the ‘prevalent American attitude that the problem [of obesity] is simply one of eating more than the body needs,’ and now it’s the prevalent attitude worldwide. … Over the years, this calories-in/calories-out paradigm of excess fat has proved to be remarkably resistant to any evidence to the contrary. Imagine a murder trial in which one credible witness after another takes the stand and testifies that the suspect was elsewhere at the time of the killing and so had an airtight alibi, and yet the jurors keep insisting that the defendant is guilty, because that’s what they believed when the trial began.”

I spent a lot of time this year buttonholing friends who’d love one title or another, talking about what I’d read on Facebook, and on and on. I delighted in the books I was reading! And I am recommitted, friends, to a more robust fiction-to-nonfiction ratio in my personal reading—in spite of the fact that I am currently wallowing (oh, like the baby elephant on the beach) in fiction.

What nonfiction have you been reading? Tell me about it in the comments!

* The previous year (2013) was My Year of Reading Irish Literature, and although I have considerable notes, I haven’t actually written that post yet. (Wait! Here it is!)

** One of these is my favorite book for 2014—but I haven’t written that post yet, so you’ll have to wait. (And here’s that one!)

Tweet: My plan to read mostly nonfiction last year—and how it worked.
Tweet: I am recommitted to a more robust fiction-to-nonfiction ratio in my personal reading.
Tweet: “I would stumble upon a topic that interested me & then read everything about it.”

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”