Booking Through Thursday-Informative Reading

What’s the most informative book you’ve read recently?

My immediate answer to this is that all reading is informative, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I suppose non-fiction would be classed as more straightforwardly informative since that is really its purpose, but since I don't read a lot of non-fiction, I thought I'd go with some fiction choices, since I think what you learn from that is more interesting anyway, and often surprising!

Firstly I'll go with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society because as well as being an entertaining read, and a fantastic way of telling a story through letters, I realised whilst reading this that I knew very little about the occupation of The Channel Islands, other than that they were occupied. I'd never really thought about the devastating effect this had on the people living on the islands and I was quite shocked,particularly considering it was so close to home.

And my most recently reviewed book, The Behaviour of Moths, was packed full of factual information about moths! I was actually slightly worried when I started this book that this would get tedious, but it was actually really informative and interesting to read about different types of moths. It was really a secondary thread in the story.

And then I suppose going slightly off on a tangent, but I could name others that although they haven't contained very much in the way of factual information themselves, have contained enough to get me interested in the subject and go off and research the subject for myself. The one that comes to mind most would be the civil war on the Island of Bougainville in Lloyd Jones Mr Pip. Yet another event in recent history that I knew woefully little about!