Armchair BEA: Ethics & Non-Fiction

I started to write a post on Literary Fiction yesterday, but life in the form of a small and wriggly ginger baby got in the way, so anyway, onwards!

Today's topics are Ethics and Non-Fiction, both things I have opinions about. To be fair, it would probably be easier to find something I don't have an opinion about but there we go.

The ethics part of this post is going to be short and sweet. I personally have no experience with plagiarism, but my feelings on it are don't do it. I always give credit whenever I've been inspired by anybody else (I probably link back to other people too much, but I figure it's better to do it more rather than less) - it's nice to share the love anyway. The other side of it is that if I have no inspiration I'm quite happy not to post for a few weeks rather than steal other people's ideas and content. I don't understand people who are that... I don't know. Lazy? Pressured? that they have to steal other people's content. I know from personal experience that often when I do actually get a post written, it constitutes several hours of work and I wouldn't appreciate people stealing chunks of it. Give credit where credit is due, and if you can't be original maybe think again about keeping a blog.

That is all.

Now, non-fiction! I'm pretty excited bout this genre at the moment. The last year or so has been big for me in terms of non-fiction reading. I'm going to give a couple of my favourites and a few that I'm particularly excited about from my TBR.

So this year my favourites have been :

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti - If you missed how much I loved this book you can check out my review/rant here. I loved it so much I even did a giveaway and that's a big deal as I'm on that part of maternity leave I don't get paid for now...

Wild by Cheryl Strayed - This is a memoir but pretty much the most frikking awesome thing I've read in a long long time. I want to read everything else Strayed has written and I finished the book totally inspired.

**EDIT**
I cannot BELIEVE I missed out Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I loved this book so much I couldn't even write a review of it although I tried several times. If you care at all about food sustainability or local produce, you must read it.

And here, in no particular order of preference, is a stack of books from my non-fiction shelf that I have yet to read:

 

These are picked purely because Bossypants and Books,Baguettes and Bedbugs have both been recommended to me numerous times by other bloggers, and because I love and adore Nora Ephron and Bill Bryson. Just to put it in perspective, there are about 30 more books just on my non-fiction shelves that I haven't read yet.

 

However, I still want more recommendations! What are you favourites? :-)