By Sarah Statz Cords
Recently an article appeared in the BBC News Magazine about a new nonfiction genre being referred to as “Annualism.” According to Finlo Rohrer, the article’s author, Annualism books are those in which “the author shows their power of endurance by doing something odd for a year.”*
With all due respect to the Beeb, I think the Reader’s Advisor Online beat them hands down on making a note of this style of book. Take a book like Doug Fine’s Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living, in which the author pledges to live off the grid in New Mexico for at least a year. If you look that title up in the RAO, you’ll find that it has been tagged with the topic “Year in the Life.” This isn’t a perfect subject tag—not all memoirists and journalists undertake these book-ready adventures for a year—but I’ll admit I think it’s just as catchy as “Annualism.”
Subscribers to our database would find, in clicking on that tag, a variety of such other fun nonfiction books (which vary widely on subject), including Beth Lisick’s Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone; Steven Rinella’s wonderful The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine; and Logan Ward’s See You in a Hundred Years: Four Seasons in Forgotten America. But, just in case the theme tag “Year in the Life” doesn’t work for you, we’ve got you covered in another way.
One of the subgenres we offer, under the broader heading of “Investigative Writing,” is “Immersion Journalism,” which we’ve defined as what “writers engage in when they go beyond the bounds of objectively researching a story and instead step directly into it, living whatever experience they’re writing about and periodically injecting their own reactions and thoughts into their narrative. They are often researched over long periods of time and are sometimes referred to as the ‘literature of the everyday’ for the insight into ordinary lives and mundane details that they provide.”
Simply by browsing our Immersion Journalism subgenre, subscribers would find titles like Barbara Ehrenreich’s popular Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, Ted Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, A.J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically, and George Plimpton’s classic Paper Lion.
Call it what you will—”annualism,” “gimmick books,” “year in the life,” “immersion journalism”—the fact remains that recent years have found us in a whole new world of nonfiction styles, genres, and offbeat subjects that don’t easily lend themselves to subject headings. And we’re just happy to be in on the conversation! So how’s about it? Who wants to write the book on working with readers for a year? A year behind the reference desk? We all know there’re a few stories to be told there…
*This is a British article, and refers at one point to a book published in the UK, titled Chastened: No More Sex in the City. Is it wrong that my favorite part of the article was in the comments, where someone opined, “If merely not having sex for a single, measly year is deemed worthy material for a book, then I ask that publishers get in touch with me at once: I have a blockbuster pending”?
