Welcome to Booking Through Thursday, a weekly bookish meme about books and reading for everyone who loves both. Booking Through Thursday was first hosted by Deb. With permission, I’ve restarted it in 2026.
This week’s prompt:
Do you have a favorite genre that’s off the beaten path?
Maybe it’s nonfiction about a particular time in history. Perhaps books for a craft or hobby. Maybe it’s hopepunk or bizarro fiction. Whatever you love, let us know (and maybe recommend a book or two).
What’s a favorite genre that others might not read?
How to play:
- On your blog: Copy the question/image for your blog, answer it there, and post a quick comment here with a link or trackback to your post so we can read it.
- On social media: Copy the image, answer the prompt, and post a quick comment here with a link.
- Right here: Answer in the comments and start the discussion here. No need to have a blog to play.
Note: If it’s your first time here, your comment may end up in moderation. (My spam filter is aggressive.) I’ll be in after my writing sprints to set it free.
P.S. The prompt is always open, and you don’t have to play on Thursday. Comment whenever you like!
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I love historical or autobiographical graphic novels. It’s a genre that many avid readers ignore but these works can be every bit as sophisticated as a the top literary award-winners. Some amazing authors/artists include: Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Craig Thompson, Guy Delisle, Catherine Meurisse, and Riad Sattouf.
Oh, I love this! I’m going to have to search out those authors and try some of their work. It sounds fascinating.
Sartrapi’s Persepolis was wrenching (and gorgeous), but clearly there are many other works to explore — thanks for these leads!
While it’s not exactly niche, I do love women-centric historical nonfiction, mainly from WWI through the Cold War. Yes, it has to be about women. It’s actually nice that this topic is a bit more mainstream so I can find more to read.
Make it fiction, about women (possibly mythological: Morgan le Fay? Clytemnestra?), and set in the classical era or medieval/renaissance age and I’ll probably read it, too.
For me, it’s collections of letters and such from naturalists who were roaming Texas in the mid-to-late 1800s. A Life Among the Texas Flora: Ferdinand Lindheimer’s Letters to George Engelmann</em is a great example.
There's plenty of general history and details about life in those times, but there also are wonderful revelations about those guys' personalities: the jealousies, competitiveness, and adaptability to difficult conditions. Also: they were seeing the land I live in with fresh eyes, which lets me see it in a new way.
Life lesson #287: close those tags!
Oh, I know! I was going to try to fix it, but I didn’t want to accidentally wipe out your comment. We can all live with italics.
That sounds fascinating. I love reading letters and letter collections.
My most off-the-beaten-path reading tends to be triggered by questions I have after movies I’ve watched, conversations I’d had, something I’ve read on the internet, etc. For awhile, these are obsessions, where one question leads to another and they often end with a stack of books towering over me. Some of which, I actually read.
For example, while watching The Admiral, a Dutch movie about a time in the 17th Century when The Netherlands was under attack by England, France, and Spain, I was horrified to learn that the strictly religious and generally orderly Dutch had lynched and cannibalized their Dutch prime minister, Johann deWitt, & his brother in The Hague. All I had to do was ask: How could this happen at a time when Vermeer was painting such tender domestic scenes, or a whole host of artists were painting peaceful landscapes and beautiful still lifes? And with just a few clicks, I was suddenly the proud owner of a 20-pound tome by Simon Schama that I’m still nibbling at, all these years later.
Or. After watching the Keanu Reeves’ 47 Ronin, someone happened to mention that they didn’t think the Japanese had demons or witches in folklore. Really?, I thought. That would be unusual. And so I looked it up, and discovered that the mutable witch featured in the movie was indeed one of the most common demons in Japanese folklore, and typically shown as a white fox with one blue eye. And in I discovered a lovely novel, The Fox Wife, as well as a couple of interesting books on Japanese art and mythology, in the process. Still nibbling on those, too.
And then there were the events that nearly led me last week to enroll in a class to learn Ancient Greek. Here’s how it started: A blogger mentions a book that sounded interesting, Travels With Herodotus, and I am reminded that I, in fact, have a copy of Herodotus’s Histories on my bookshelf that I’ve been meaning to read. And the experience of reading the two of these practically in tandem excited some interest in all things Classical, and so I suddenly found myself reading (and finishing!) The Odyssey, The Iliad, and everything I can by Emily Wilson on the art of translating through time and across culture. I’ve had to take breaks, of course. There was a Richard Osman mystery that came out, and all the currently released volumes of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion — and I definitely needed to make time for those. But now, it’s back to business. For the record, I am staggered by The Iliad — Wilson’s translation makes the work seem so vivid, so emotional, it’s practically operatic.
The Wikipedia article has a rather gruesome painting of the brothers deWitt on the public gibbet (although before the cannibalism, one assumes).
I must look into Emily Wilson’s translations. As someone who still can’t decide which translation of The Master and Margarita to read, I die a little inside every time someone mentions AI translations.
Oh my. That was a horrifying picture — I’m glad you forewarned me, so I could steel myself. The movie, fwiw, was considerably less graphic.
If you have the chance, Wilson’s writing about translation (Crossing the Wine Dark Sea) is interesting, and you’ll get the feeling for her pre-occupations as she develops a translation. Her introductory notes to The Iliad were a nice bit of revelation & illumination for me. If you look around, you’ll find people who criticize her translation for one reason or another, or recommend someone else to read, but I get the feeling that this is always the case with translations. It’s like picking your favorite rendering of Chopin’s preludes. I’m a totally team Pogerelich, but I’ll admit that Martha Argerich’s interpretations are pretty wonderful, too, Rubenstein as well.
It is always the case with translations. There’s a very heated subreddit out there about the translation of The Master and Margarita, and honestly, I should simply pick one and (re)read it.
Don’t know if it counts as niche, but I do like old girls’ books (generally the older the better, with a high somewhere around 1900) and also mainstream novels from the forties or so.
Hi Brid, I definitely think that’s a niche and an interesting one, too! Thanks for stopping by!
Miniature-making guides are one of my favorite off-the-beaten-path categories. The best ones sit somewhere between craft reference and visual storytelling: scale, lighting, texture, and composition all matter, even when the finished scene is only a few inches wide. They also make ordinary materials feel unexpectedly interesting.
Hi Kathy, what an interesting off-the-beaten-path category! Thanks for stopping by!