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For sometime now, I've known that it would make sense to separate out the books/authors whose subject matter is based on real people or historical events. In discussions with some of the reviewers, it was agreed that calling the bookshelf "Historical Fiction" might be misconstrued as intending to mean historical romantic fiction - a subgenre that we let other sites with more expertise (and interest) make recommendations. So we needed a term that would encompass both biographical fiction and that which explores a specific event. I lit on the idea of calling the new bookshelf "Facing History" as a way to express how we feel reading these types of novels. The authors, in their research and due diligence often paint a multifaceted face on a person(s) or event(s) in history. By choosing to portray the person/event as fictional rather than as nonfiction, it gives the writer/reader a chance to explore or re-imagine things giving, perhaps, a different twist on events than one might have expected. Then again, it is my personal belief that fiction can speak far more truths than nonfiction. Certainly, I find more pleasure when I face history through fiction than nonfiction. Thus, this is the bookshelf where you will find fiction that is expressly written to capture the life or times of a person, people or events. They are not necessarily historical novels, but they are usually well researched and it remains fiction because the author re-imagined a life more than just recreates it. Some will clearly be about a person, such as Dancer by Colum McCann. Others will be set at a specific period of time and will include real people mixed in with fictional (Forever by Pete Hamill, Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, or Three Farmers on their Way to Dance by Richard Powers, etc.); still others will be a fictional account of a real event in history, for example, The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve or Susannah Morrow by Megan Chance. There are books on other bookshelves that you might think should also be on this one since so much of fiction does intertwine bits of real life past and present. I agree. Mind you this is not a science and most days is a far cry from an art determining how to organize this site. Should books on World War II and/or the holocaust be on this shelf or the Around the World bookshelf? I chose to leave them on Around the World. Certainly, the majority of the Latin American and even The Wild West novels are essentially biographical and historical fiction. But again, I left those where they sit. Some novels on the Murder Mysteries bookshelf and Contemporary bookshelf, could also be moved here. To make decisions, I tried to apply filters, like asking is it specifically about a life or an event and not just an historical setting, does it include real people mixed with fictional. But then I'd move the author/book and then I'd move it back. I realized I had one overriding filter -- the reading experience -- which bookshelf most reflects this. By the way, for real life (nonfiction), visit True Adventure. |
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Creating a new bookshelf is always a hard job -- it takes time to extricate the author pages from their respective bookshelves, to select the colors for the shelf (don't laugh, this is no minor task) and of course, to decide what it is going to be about and giving it a name.
