A little nonfiction talk...

If I'm *really* being honest, I don't do non-fiction. I read to escape. Period. However, in going through our non-fiction here at Teen Central, I've found some books that I'm adding to my must read pile and I thought maybe some of you would be interested as well...

1. Chew on This by Eric Schlosser

I really didn't need to browse through this one after stopping at a local burger joint for lunch. I'm sure the faces I made while browsing some of the facts in this expose on American fast food were humorous...to everyone else in the room. I officially don't want to know how many cows my lunch came from. Makes a girl look for the nearest friendly piece of lettuce.

2. Ophelia Speaks by Sara Shandler

I've always loved looking into other people's lives. Books that provide glimpses at how other people live and the experiences other people have fascinate me. This one offers the look into the hearts of a thousand teenage girls on subjects that range from boys to school to politics. I can't wait to read this book of honest confessions.

3. America Through the Lens: Photographers Who Changed the Nation by Martin W. Sandler
In history class, I always found it hard to concentrate on the text because the pictures were always so arresting. It was like peering back through a window in time to really connect with the people of a particular time period. I flipped open this book and found one of my all time favorite historical photos. It's a photo of a woman and her two children during the Great Depression by Dorothea Lange called "Migrant Mother". I always had thought the woman in the picture must be in her late 40s, according the the photographer she was just 32. This book shows and tells the stories of many photographs and photographers dating from the civil war on up to some really cool NASA photographs that were taken in the late 60s.

4. A Maze Me: Poems for Girls by Naomi Shihab Nye

Speaking of pictures, I've always thought of poems as the photographs as literature. If a novel is a movie, then a poem is a freeze frame snapshot of a particular moment momentous or simple. Just reading two or three of the poems in this book of verse made me want to gobble the whole thing in one sitting. I'm not sure if I like "Moving House" or "Worry" better.

5.The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon

I'm a sucker for a good memoir and The Burn Journals looks like a good bet. Brent Runyon set himself on fire when he was fourteen. And he survived. He tells all about that startling act, what came after, and the what got him there in the first place.