How I read and rate non-fiction | Non-fiction November

Welcome to another post! Today, I’m going to talk a bit about non-fiction and my experience with it.

📚Reading non-fiction📚

Typically, I read history books (if you’ve seen my last 5OnMyTBR post you can see that’s what I normally reach for!) but I also like non-fiction with politics or social issues. 

When I read non-fiction, my main aim is to learn something new about the past or about our society today. I do pick up non-fiction for enjoyment too, but that definitely affects how I read and rate them. 

The biggest difference between reading fiction and non-fiction is the pace and timing. Fiction books are always my main focus of reading, so I normally read non-fiction on the side and for smaller chunks of time. I also read non-fiction slower to retain the information, and I’ll make notes casually if I find something particularly interesting, useful or impactful. I like always having a non-fiction book to read, but I haven’t been doing that too much lately! This is why on goodreads you can see that I’ve read most of my non-fiction books over the span of 2-4 weeks, when most of my fiction books are within a week. It’s not that I value fiction over non-fiction, but I think non-fiction books need to be consumed in a totally different way from fiction.

🌟Rating non-fiction🌟

This has always been hard for me to do, because I don’t read non-fiction for the same reasons as fiction and therefore I can’t rate it the same. I’ve struggled to decide whether I should rate non-fiction at all. Do I rate it for the research, or the writer’s voice, or my enjoyment, or how interesting it was? And it depends on the type of non-fiction too, because I wouldn’t rate a history book the same way as a biography or a self-help book. But I feel like I should still rate them, especially if they were a particularly good book. 

I have been rating non-fiction on goodreads, but I think for now I will stop rating non-fiction, unless it is amazing and deserves 5 stars for its information and my enjoyment. Otherwise, it can be hard to judge and I don’t have a rating system like I do for fiction yet! I can still talk about them and recommend them to who I think would value it – that’s what my blog is for after all – but I don’t need to put as much pressure on myself to stick to a set rating!

Thanks for reading! How do you read and rate non-fiction, and what are your favourite types of non-fiction?

—ella♥