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Take the time to read Jessica Zeller's article in the June 2007 Libraries Unlimited, [url http://lu.com/ranews/jun2007/zellers.cfm ]Women's Nonfiction: A Genre Waiting to Happen?
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What do you think? Is non-fiction more to a man's liking? Any particular titles come to mind that women might like more than men? Easy picks, Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.What else?

> Take the time to read Jessica Zeller's article in the
> June 2007 Libraries Unlimited, [url
> http://lu.com/ranews/jun2007/zellers.cfm ]Women's
> Nonfiction: A Genre Waiting to Happen?
> [/url]
> What do you think? Is non-fiction more to a man's
> liking? Any particular titles come to mind that women
> might like more than men? Easy picks, Glass Castle by
> Jeanette Walls, Year of Magical Thinking by Joan
> Didion.What else?

I'm pretty interested in survival stories, and what I call dysfunctional family memoirs, such as The Glass Castle, All Over but the Shoutin', Running with Scissors, Change Me into Zeus's Daughter, and A Girl Called Zippy, to name a few.

And others that come to mind would be books by Barbara Ehrenreich like Nickel and Dimed. Her books have been very popular with our female patrons. Memoirs are very high on the list.
Like Jessica Zeller, I think there's a preconception that women read fiction and men read non-fiction. If that were true in the past, and I'm not certain it was, I see much more of a blend of both forms and gender today. Perhaps in the end, readers are readers and will read what appeals to them. Women might be looking for something different in non-fiction than men do. Just look at the popularity of Glass Castle and Year of Magical Thinking.
In our non-fiction book group, books that win high marks seem to have good sense of place, people that you care about, enough detail told in layman's language. For instance, Erik Larsen's Devil In the White City won approval of the whole group while his Issac's Storm did not. The group did not care enough about the people in this true telling of deadly Galveston Hurricane. They attributed this to the journalistic approach by Larsen. Something lacking. The group is now reading Worst Hard Time : the untold story of those who survived the great American dust bowl / by Timothy Egan. Preliminary comments are very favorable and most of the group is made up of women though generally at least 3 men attend. And even our fiction group, all women, will be reading Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell. Craughwell tells of the forgotten event of the attempted theft of the president's body. It reads like narrative fiction and perhaps this is where the appeal lies. Good story telling while learning something from history.

Good article in LJ Feburary 15,2007

Exploring Non Fiction; covers everything from "aspects" of non fiction (narrative, subject, elements and type) to a list of 15 nonfiction sure bets. I am starting to merchandise our non fiction section more and keep a list of non fiction books I read. I needed to learn how to talk about non fiction to patrons and this article helped a bit.

We have a larger request for non fiction here, especially from our older patrons.