My non-fiction reading style is vastly different from my fiction style. In fiction I'm after an experience, entertainment, some kind of thrill--literary, visceral, whatever. With non-fiction, I'm after information that I can integrate into my personal databank, so I'm looking for a different interaction with the words. Wit and style are necessary in fiction, but too much of those can get in the way with non-fiction.

All right, I have finally joined Goodreads! Be my friend if that is a thing that should happen.

I'm glad to see my not-so-secret plan to get everyone to join Goodreads is working.

So, I have an assignment for class. I must choose and read a book (fiction or non-fiction) related to grief and bereavement.

Her suggestions: Making Rounds With Oscar, Winter Garden, The Help, Watering the Elephants, Any Jody Picoult Book, The Notebook, Bed Number 10

I will admit to being skeptical of this list. Anyone have any ideas?

Isn't The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion supposed to be very good?

It was quite good. Her newest book, Blue Nights, I believe, is supposed to marvelous dealing more with her grief over her daughter's death.

C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed is excellent (and a much deeper howl of grief than the rather remote title would suggest--he was simply absolutely determined to clearly see and name his own grief while he experienced it, because language was how he coped with absolutely everything) and also a pretty fast read.

If children's/YA is acceptable, there's always Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia.

Gloria Naylor's Mama Day doesn't dig into the grief until the last quarter of the novel, but it's wrenching and gorgeous.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, most definitely not for everyone (it was emphatically a big harrowing yes for me, but I'm a freak), but oh is it filled with sorrow and bereavement.

And Maxine Chernoff's 1991 novel Plain Grief (reviewed here by Hilma Wolitzer) is excellent (I recall liking it more than Wolitzer did, but she did like it quite a bit, and her review does a great job of quickly running through the complex narrative and all its varieties of grief).

Huh. The community theatre I worked with is doing a one-woman production of the Didion.

The textbook quoted extensively from Lewis.

but I'm a freak

This is my problem with "normal people" book lists. I am not the typical student, in a variety of way.

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado

The textbook quoted extensively from Lewis.

Then the textbook is way better than the reading list!

And I just thought of two picture books for children that deal with the subject very movingly (surely better than the damn Notebook!):

Annie and the Old One

The Two of Them