I thought I was going to finish July off with my first official bingo but my blurb buddies option, though I am enjoying it so far, has proven a challenging read for my dyslexia. It will probably be more than a week before I finish it. That being said, I made it through two more straightforward nonfiction books that were a bit easier for me to concentrate on.
1. Cultural Nonfiction- Cultish by Amanda Montell. This might not be exactly what this prompt was talking about but I thought it appropriate because it was a fascinating look into the cultures of some of the modern world’s sketchiest communities like SoulCycle and LuLuLemon, explaining in depth how the founders of such groups rely on similar tactics to those of infamous cult leaders to take advantage of unsuspecting and curious new recruits. I actually wrote a paper on a similar topic, comparing the speech patterns of politicians to cult leaders in grad school one year before this book was originally published. This might be a niche interest but it is well written and fascinating to linguist nerds like myself.
2. Microhistory- Chain Saw Confidential by Gunnar Hansen. I’ve been in a horror mood lately so I searched microhistory books about horror movies and came up with this. The story behind the making of one of my favorite movies of all time, straight from the mouth of Leatherface himself. This is definitely a very specific interest as well, but I would suggest it to any fan of Chain Saw and horror movies in general. Hansen goes into great detail about how some of the most infamous and groundbreaking shots of the movie were captured. I was hesitant to include this in the challenge at first but once I got through it I did feel it fit the microhistory genre better than the memoir genre as there is actually very little of Hansen’s own life sprinkled throughout the story. You might actually learn something about movie making if you pick this book up.
