I never got around to finishing my post for last week’s Nonfiction November prompt about what makes you choose a particular nonfiction book. It’s very hard to spin “because I want to read it” out into a full post, but I honestly do not have a more sophisticated answer than that. This week, however, we have arrived at my favourite week of the month – book pairings! I’m arriving a bit late to the party, but I’m here now. This week’s host is Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running, and Working from Home.
This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like! You can feel free to use books you’ve read any time in this last year or whenever.
In recent years, I’ve tried pairing nonfiction books with TV programmes and Youtube channels, but this year I’m returning to the actual spirit of the prompt. Without in any way meaning to, I’ve read three novels this year that focus – with varying levels of success – on the letters and/or unpublished manuscripts of fictional writers: Possession (poet Randolph Ash), The Distant Hours (novelist Raymond Blythe), and The Stranger Diaries (short story writer RM Holland). I thought it might therefore be fun to find some biographies, letter collections, and other nonfiction about real writers – and I’ve even found a poet, a novelist, and a short story writer, all the better to correspond to my original books.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne – Katherine Rundell
I have not made a particularly comprehensive study of John Donne’s work, but I very much like the little I’ve read. Also, his work is pretty liberally quoted in the Wimsey-Vane romance in DL Sayers’ novels, which further endears him to me. Donne had a pretty weird and fascinating life, and I’ve heard such good things about this biography. It’s been on my shelf for a while, and I’m hoping to tackle it over the Christmas break. (This has been a very long and stressful term, but over Christmas I have three entire weeks of holiday. Some of it is university closure days; some is annual leave; all of it will be wonderful reading time. I have already started making a pile of books, and this is on the very top).
The Letters of JRR Tolkien – edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien
Tolkien is a forever-favourite author for me. Of course I want to read his letters. This collection, organised by his authorised biographer Humphrey Carpenter, focuses on the letters that discuss his process of gradually creating Middle-earth and his feelings about writing generally. It also includes some of the letters he wrote to his sons when they were serving in WWII, and reflections on his own experiences of WWI. This is obviously not the type of book you read cover to cover, but I do want to work my way through them gradually. I’m always interested to read about the creative processes of writers I admire – and perhaps none more so than Tolkien, for whom the worldbuilding part was so very important.
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making – John Curran
Yes, I know Christie is now famous for her novels, but she got her start writing short stories and she was very good at it. It counts. Anyway, I respect Christie’s craftsmanship enormously. This book by scholar John Curran looks at how she worked out and developed her ideas, and more generally at her writing process. He was given access to her entire archive of notebooks, and this book (which is otherwise nonfiction) even includes two short stories that had never before been published. The writing process of an author who was so exceptional at plots should really be of interest to anyone who wants to write genre fiction, I think – and all the more so to me because I love so many of Christie’s books.
There you have it! Three books that have been written because real biographers or scholars have done the kind of archival detective work carried out by the protagonists of Possession, The Distant Hours, and The Stranger Diaries. This has been as much fun as this week of November always is. And I’ll take any recommendations for books on how individual writers write, which is a subject of endless fascination for me!
louloureads 
Isn’t Byatt’s Possession just wonderful? The vocabulary! I immediately bought her The Children’s Book but have yet to actually read it. Interesting pairings, thank you. I have not tried reading one of the many books featuring letters written by people in history – only because too many books problem. But you’ve renewed my interest.
Yes, Byatt’s Possession really is incredible – one of the best reading experiences I’ve had this year, for sure. I posted this before I learnt that she had died, and I’m glad that (in a very minor way) the post pays tribute to her work! I want to read The Children’s Book too – in fact I want to read all her work, but that’s where I plan to start.
Books of letters are challenging. I tried one by Langston Hughes, but I couldn’t follow to whom he was writing and what the context was. I have a book of Zora Neale Hurston letters I’m eager to read, and Kurt Vonnegut has a collection, too. As for the Hurston collection, I’m interested to see what she has to say because she was notorious for lying to butter up the right people.
I think I know enough biographical detail about Tolkien’s life that I know who most of the key players are – and I’ve read enough of Christopher Tolkien’s stuff to know that he likes context a lot, so I expect he has made it clear in a foreword or something. That Hurston collection does sound fascinating!
It’s likely you’ve read Stephen King’s On Writing, but if not, you must.
Thanks for sharing your pairings
It’s on my list! It’s been recommended to me in the past and it does sound great. Thanks for reading and commenting 🙂
I enjoyed but didn’t love Super-Infinite.
I’m feeling hopeful about it – though it is very much outside what I would normally read, so I don’t know what I’ll make of it!
Ha, great idea for pairings! I’m not really interested in memoirs or biographies of writers – sometimes I find knowing about them kills the magic, or makes me dislike them so much as a person it seeps into my feelings about their books. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss! However the Agatha Christie book is tempting…
I sometimes find the same thing about memoirs of authors, but biographies are generally okay for some reason. That said, almost the first thing I ever knew about Virginia Woolf was how vile she was to her servants. I’ve never been able to read anything of hers since without thinking about that – it especially coloured A Room of One’s Own when I tried to read it.
That’s interesting, because Mrs Dalloway’s attitude to her servants was the thing that mostly made me dislike that book and put me off reading any more Woolf. I got the distinct impression that her feminism didn’t extend to the servant class…
These all sounds great – probably because they’re all about authors that I already know and love! Very different but we have a lovely book that compiles all of the Letters from Father Christmas that Tolkien wrote for his children, along with the pictures he drew. The creativity of his mind never ceases to amaze me!
Oh yes, I love the Father Christmas letters! I have been thinking that it might be time for a reread this year, actually – I read it when I first bought it, maybe during 2020, but haven’t looked at it since.
Oh, they’re so lovely! That inspired Peter and I to start a tradition where we tell our girls a story over the month of December with a new instalment every night.