The quick and easy way to pick a new non-fiction book and get reading
“Keep reading. It’s one of the most marvelous adventures anyone can have.”
I totally agree with this quote by author Lloyd Alexander.
A great book will take you to another world plus inspire and heighten your own writing.
This week I’m sharing my summer must-read list of autobiography books for 2019.
I’ve aimed for a shortlist diverse in authors, topics and accolades.
Plus I am giving away a copy of One Life by Kate Grenville to kickstart one person’s reading year.
Let’s get started …
Related article – Best books of 2018: Must-read books about life stories to enjoy these holidays
Related article – Book review: Educated by historian Tara Westover
Must read: Working Class Man by Jimmy Barnes, HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
It’s a life too big and a story too extraordinary for just one book.
Jimmy Barnes has lived many lives – from Glaswegian migrant kid to iconic front man, from solo superstar to proud father of his own musical clan.
In this hugely anticipated sequel to his critically acclaimed bestseller, Working Class Boy, Jimmy picks up the story of his life as he leaves Adelaide in the back of an old truck with a then unknown band called Cold Chisel.
A spellbinding and searingly honest reflection on success, fame and addiction; this self-penned memoir reveals how Jimmy Barnes used the fuel of childhood trauma to ignite and propel Australia’s greatest rock’n’roll story.
But beyond the combustible merry-go-round of fame, drugs and rehab, across the Cold Chisel, solo and soul years – this is a story about how it’s never too late to try and put things right.
Related article – Book review: Working Class Man by Cold Chisel’s Jimmy Barnes
Related article – Book review: Working Class Boy by Cold Chisel’s Jimmy Barnes
Becoming by Michelle Obama, Penguin Books Ltd
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States.
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era.
As First Lady of the United States of America-the first African-American to serve in that role-she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the US and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments.
Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.
In her must-read memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her-from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address.
Related article – Book review: Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Becoming by Penguin Books Ltd
No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani and translator Omid Tofighian, Pan Macmillan Australia
“Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains…”
In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island.
“People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests…”
This book is the result.
Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi.
It is a voice of witness, an act of survival.
A lyric first-hand account.
A cry of resistance.
A vivid portrait through six years of incarceration and exile.
“Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains?”
Related article – Book review: No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani
The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart, Oxford University Press Inc
A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the twentieth century to mentor a generation of young artists like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro – the gender ambiguous, transformative, artistic African Americans whose art would subjectivize Black people and embolden greatness.
Alain Locke (1885-1954) believed Black Americans were sleeping giant that could transform America into a truly humanistic and pluralistic society.
In the 1920s, these views were radical, but by announcing a New Negro in art, literature, music, dance, theatre, Locke shifted the discussion of race from the problem-centered discourses of politics and economics to the new creative industries of American modernism.
Although this Europhile detested jazz, he used the Jazz Age interest in Black aesthetics to plant the notion in American minds that Black people were America’s quintessential artists and Black urban communities were crucibles of creativity where a different life was possible in America.
By promoting art, a Black dandy subjectivized Black people and became in the process a New Negro himself.
Related article – Book review: Pulitzer Prize winner The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
Fake by Stephanie Wood, Random House Australia
A powerful, richly layered investigative story for our times, drawing on the personal stories of the author and other women who have been drawn into relationships based on duplicity and false hope.
Women the world over are brought up to hope, even expect, to find the man of their dreams and live happily ever after.
When Stephanie Wood meets a former architect turned farmer she embarks on an exhilarating romance with him.
He seems compassionate, loving, truthful.
They talk about the future. She falls in love.
Stephanie also becomes increasingly beset by anxiety at his frequent cancellations, no-shows and bizarre excuses.
She starts to wonder, who is this man?
When she ends the relationship Stephanie reboots her journalism skills and embarks on a romantic investigation.
She discovers a story of mind-boggling duplicity and manipulation.
Related article – Book review: Journalist Stephanie Wood’s Fake by Penguin Random House
Must read: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, Grove Press
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it.
It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant—the postwar optimism seemed assured.
Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children.
But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
This is the must-read story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina.
Related article – New York Times Best Seller The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Final say: Must read books for 2020 + competition
If you are looking for a new must-read book for the holiday season the list above should have something to keep you turning pages.
Plus enter to win my copy of One Life by Kate Grenville, Text Publishing Co.
When Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir.
These were the starting point for One Life, the must-read story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change.
To enter simply send me an email here titled ‘One Life comp’ telling me your favourite book for 2019 and why you loved it!
Entrants must also be subscribers of my Facebook page and YouTube channel.
I will select one winner on January 1, 2020, and notify by email.
If nothing else this week pick up a life-story book to see out the year.
Read to learn others’ stories and life experiences but also to help hone your own work.
Happy writing and reading!
Free gift!
Write your own autobiography, memoir, biography or life-story project in 2020! Take the first step to plan your chapters with the free Forever Young Autobiographies structure success video training. Sign up here or fill in the form below.
Your say
Which must-read book are you going to start? Got any faves to add to the list? I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email or leave a reply in the comments section at the end of this article.
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This article first appeared on the website Forever Young Autobiographies.com.