Non-Fiction Meme

I've been tagged for this meme by Bookfool. I'm pleased. Fiction vs. non-fiction duke it out every year in my reading journals, with fiction winning every year so far except 1998. I always hope non-fiction will win, but it doesn't work out that way. Maybe this year...who knows? I can never stick to a reading plan, because I'm always discovering new (to me) writers...like Nick *sigh* Hornby. Meanwhile, I'm working on a non-fiction book right now -- Brainiac by Ken Jennings -- and doing this meme:

1. What issues/topics interest you the most? Anything with a Korean connection interests me, for obvious reasons, and I'm starting to feel an extreme fascination for Canada. I like memoirs about moving into another culture, difficulties/ease in assimilating along with the additional complexity of encountering/learning another language. Put a biography of a literary/artsy figure in my hands and I'm pretty happy, but I like it better if they're dead, so I'm reading their complete story. I like accounts of people who endured great hardship, whether or not they lived or perished. Book about food interest me, but not neccessarily cookbooks, which frustrate me because I have no decent cooking equipment and no access to many of the ingredients required. I'm attracted to self-help books. I try to resist them, but sometimes I lose. After I finish them, I often feel cheated. I like critical studies and essays about cinema. I'm interested in books about baseball, but I'm starting to get interested in reading about other sports as well. Games, too, like Scrabble or poker. If the subject is a little quirky, I'm all over it, or have plans to be. Most of all, I'm crazy for books about books and reading and readers. There's more, but this paragraph is monstrously long, even for me.

2. Would you like to review books concerning these? Oh, sure.

3. Would you like to be paid or do it as an interest or hobby? Why? In my wildest dreams, I'd like to be a book reviewer for either of the big English-language newspapers here. Why? Oh, so I could meet every other expat bookworm in South Korea, of course. Deep down, I know it's best to keep it all as a hobby, so as not to take the shine off of it.

4. Would you recommend those to your friends and how? I babbled incessantly about A Walk In The Woods for about 3 years until Mr. Bybee took it back with him to read on the plane. My mom is a tough nut to crack. I read the semi-porn romance POS she recommended, but she has yet to check out the copy of The Glass Castle I gave her two birthdays ago or The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio that I left behind this last visit. She'd eat them up if she'd just give them a chance! Sometimes I have some luck with my son, but lately, he's been introducing interesting non-fiction to me, more than the other way around. My best luck in recommending books seems to be here, on my blog.

5. If you've already done something like this, link it to your post: Last May, I reviewed How To Cook A Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher, a book about food that filled and dazzled my senses.