When we planned the trip in New Jersey for our younger son’s senior recital, we allowed some extra days to hang out with him. And we have, at least when he’s not practicing, or sleeping, or studying, or working. Since it’s cold here, we’re spending a lot of that time in the Cafe at Barnes and Noble.

Entering today, I perused the Must-Read Nonfiction table and immediately thought, These books are not about facts. Then Obvious Man leapt into my head, noting that nonfiction doesn’t mean factual, it means not fictional. Hence this Contemplation of Nonfiction, which is not the same as a Contemplation of Truth.

Biographies on the table included Chernow’s Grant and Alexander Hamilton, Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, and Gold Dust Woman, about Stevie Nicks. Only the most boring biography will be about facts, and the most boring biography is not going to make the must-read table. What we tell biographers about ourselves, what others remember of us, what we write in letters and diaries, what we say in conversations: all of these are far from objective truth. The biographer can only assure us that these sources are accurately transcribed.

I hope Hamilton the biography is more accurate than Hamilton the musical. The guy was a disdainful elitist who prized hierarchy and feared democracy, folks!

Memoirs are obviously hopeless fonts of wishful thinking. It’s literally impossible to observe ourselves objectively, since we can only approach that subject from it’s own viewpoint. Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist and Springsteen’s Born to Run were on offer. I’ve read the former; while including some facts, its most riveting insights concern her childhood-shaped self-image, which surely informed both her early success and her untimely death.

Can one really escape childhood?

I strongly objected to the inclusion on the table of Why Buddhism is True, until my fabulously widely-read husband explained it argues that the practice of meditation has real physiological and psychological benefits, apart from the metaphysical aspects of the religion. Ok, that’s possible.

What about The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander with a forward by Cornel West? With two political activists named on the cover, my instinct is to suspect this book has a viewpoint, and like many of us, I suspect viewpoints other than mine may be fictional.  Yet a well-argued viewpoint can be persuasive, and persuasive writing is certainly a category of non-fiction. In my dotage, I even allow emotionally-based arguments, since I’ve come to accept, regretfully, that those are most persuasive to Humans.

There were standard examples of general nonfiction, such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, a carefully researched work that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Climate change deniers might move it to the fiction table. At the other extreme, I was surprised to see the classic, true-story-based thriller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, published in 1994 and still the longest-standing NYT Best Seller, at 216 weeks. If you think you should read nonfiction but prefer novels, this one is for you.

I laughed to see The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a book I love, but nonfiction? The author certainly believes it, and there are some helpful tips, including one that became a mantra for me: Don’t Buy Anything until you Know where you’ll Store it. On the other hand, she believes that sock balls are painful to socks, and non-read books want to be freed to find someone who will read them. The damage definitely started in her childhood.

Other self-help books on the table included The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, Wreck This Journal, and How to Get Shit Done. You might get lucky with one of these, but nonfiction does not constitute a guarantee.

Finally, I must mention Roz Chast’s Going Into Town. You know Roz Chast, yes? A comic-strip author. Aren’t comics usually in the fiction section? This one is a “love letter to New York”, so she was able to jump genres. So have dozens of graphic novels. Expression of nonfiction, as well as of truth, is not confined to words.