I was sent with the mission to find a non-fiction book about whatever I wanted and write a review on it. With a good amount of time I stumbled upon a book called Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners about etiquette. Henry Alford takes a trip to Japan and observes their culture and "politeness" of everyday life and has coaches teach him along with various other sources and learns about how to be polite.
My problem is how can I make this book seem more interesting to me? I have yet to find very many non-fiction books that are entertaining in any way. It seems when people would rather be distanced and vacant from the world simply whisked away into a fantasy realm. Also, it's very difficult to find any book very original, because many books use the same ideas and topics that the plot lines all seem so similar, they could have been written by the same author. This problem occurs with non-fiction at an even more severe rate. Non-fiction has a very small audience that each book targets. A military officer might be interested in a book dealing with a military sniper, but it isn't likely that he'd want to read cookbooks set for middle aged women. What I don't like is how rigid non-fiction has to be. Memoirs excluded, non-fiction is kind of boring in comparison to books like Harry Potter or the soon to be a movie Hunger Games. When there is so many interesting fantasies in the world today, reality seems so boring.
This is the reason that video games sell the way they do. Video games are no where near reality. The images and ideas that they can provoke set them aside, because reality is only exciting when it can beat fantasy and become a basis for it. Valkyrie was entertaining for a large part mainly because the extreme evil was Hitler and the organization that opposed him had a cool name. Even though this was based on truth, the scenes were over dramatized and the actors were very good. When you look at modern day books, find how many are about WW2 and you'll see that many are claimed to be non-fiction. This happens when people either write memoirs or amplify the facts of an important event that they found.
In today's book market, the demand is so low that people are only looking for a select few kinds if books that are non-fiction. I've observed that in modern book naming, the books have extrememly lengthy and un-nessacarily specific titles. This is that if you're looking for a book on lets say the military, googling Military non-fiction books gives you links that direct you to, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, and others which we can all agree are very specific descriptions of the book itself. People in the world realize that non-fiction is second to the wild description and entertainment found in fictionous accounts.
My book that I choose is an example of what can't be described as a journey to an entertaining world throught the insight of a thought inspiring auther, but rather a book that can be stomached and regurgitated. Something that I can process and spit out on whim. Something that has no real way of making you think, because in the book, you don't think. The auther thinks for you and you have to think about what they are thinking, once again leading us to become bored as we are less engaged with the material.
Hopefully a new book will come out and force the reader to have his own philosophical moment and decide things for himself instead of just have a man or woman tell them a story that is alike to the stories that your friends and family talk of everyday. A part that goes into finding a book is that you would rather read something that you are comfortable with reading. It's easy to imagine Rush Limbaugh reading through Godless: The Church of Liberalism a book about why Chritianity and Judaism are outlawed in America, but I'm sure that he wouldn't ever even dare read a book on liberalism such as The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism. We all need to come out of our shells and read the books that oppose our views if we are to have a good time, but as of now the world will just walk past the books on a shelf set neglected presenting titles that fill up the whole book and ideas that we agree with.
