As a reader of non-fiction, one of the things that frustrates me is finding I’ve bought a reference book without knowing it was going to be that kind of title. No doubt there are plenty of book buyers who want the sort of titles you can just dip in and out of when something needs looking up, but I tend to use the internet for those moments.

There was a time when I didn’t really appreciate that non-fiction had so much more going on than just reference books, and I missed out as a consequence. How-to books might take up rather a lot of the genre’s foreground sometimes, but there’s far more to it than those, as well. Discovering that non-fiction is full of titles I can read for the pleasure of it, has been a revelation.

Non-fiction can be incredibly readable. It’s in many ways more diverse than genre fiction, because the author is more likely to feel they should be saying something new rather than rehashing something familiar. Good non-fiction has all the flow, excitement, and engagement of a good story, and non-fiction writers often use narrative approaches to get their points across.

A non-fiction book can be a journey through a landscape of ideas and possibilities. It can be a large percentage autobiographical even when autobiography isn’t really the point. Humanising facts and theories can make them a lot easier to digest. Non-fiction can inspire, enable and uplift.

I just wish it had a better name. It seems a bit sad to me, categorising this vast array of different kinds of writing in terms of the one thing it is not!

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