I’ve been reading more non-fiction these days, and I wanted to note a trend in the kind of books I’ve enjoyed most.

One is American Prometheus, the in-depth biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis for Nolan’s recent film (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve been listening to this one on audiobook on my evening walks.

The other one is Space Odyssey, a book by Michael Benson on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I finished reading last week in preparation for a rewatch of the movie.¹ I expected this one to be 200-250 pages when I bought it on Kindle, and it turned out to be a hefty 600 pages – a good surprise.

These books share a tendency to use their immense length to focus on the minutiae of their subject – one man in the first case, and one film in the other. Each reproduces heaps of documents from the time as well as detailed eyewitness accounts from people involved – first-person testimony, essentially.

The length and the reliance on personal accounts come together to create an immersion in the day-to-day of the subject, and allows the reader to “live” in the world of the book, the way one can feel with a good novel. You have access not to the thoughts of the characters – though those can come through at times – but to the feel of the time in which they lived. You find yourself side-by-side with these people, watching their lives and works happen.

American Prometheus, for example, spends scores of pages detailing the various points of view on one meeting between Oppenheimer and Haakon Chevallier, and, later, reproduces tranches of correspondences and official documents hashing out a few public statements Oppenheimer made about his colleagues’ communist leanings.

A Space Odyssey, meanwhile, lovingly details every aspect of the production of Kubrick’s incredible film, but also spends several pages telling you how Kubrick screwed Clarke out of a profit share in the film by reproducing contract terms between Kubrick and Clarke as well as Kubrick and MGM, and Clarke’s letters to various acquaintances discussing his feelings on the matter.² You get a side-helping of Clarke’s financial woes between an expensive divorce settlement and an exploitative lover.

I’ve found myself thoroughly enjoying this kind of immersion, and every time I emerge from the reading back into the world, I have the same feeling of slight disorientation in coming back to reality as I do with good novels.

I should note, this is a different kind of immersion than that of creative non-fiction such as In Cold Blood or Homicide: Life on the Streets, which narrate the incidents as if the author were in fact writing a novel. That is immersion too, but it imitates the aesthetic and style of a novel, while this other kind of immersion replicates the detail and specificity of a well-told story, drawing only from the facts and not filling anything in.

I quite like the “wide sweep of history” kind of non-fiction that gives you a lot of information in a short amount of time.³ But now that I notice this particular strand of immersive non-fiction, I find myself far more drawn to it.

The idea of someone taking a small sliver of history either grand or mundane and lovingly researching it and producing a proper tome that the reader can get lost in – that’s a boon.

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1. I’ve only watched the movie once before – now twice – but Clarke’s novel was a childhood treasure and I read it to absolute, literal shreds. ↩︎
2. Later, equal time is spent on how Kubrick diminished the work of Douglas Trumbull and others and kept the design credit mostly for himself. Clearly a talented man, Kubrick, but not the kindest, and certainly a bit neurotic when it came to his collaborators.
   In contrast, I know multiple comics writers who spend a large amount of time directing the art, colours and letters in their books, but wouldn’t dream of actually being co-credited for those things in the book. ↩︎
3. I’m now reading For Profit, a history of corporations using eight specific corporations from the Roman Republic to today’s start-up world. This one’s a svelte 350 pages, and doesn’t spend more than 50 pages on each corporation, which works for what it’s trying to do – give you an overview on the subject. I wouldn’t want this to be a bigger book.
   Instead, now that I realise my favourite chapter was on the British East India Company, I plan to supplement my reading with John Keay’s The Honourable Company, which is the authoritative immersive history on that particular topic. ↩︎