A weekend home sick is conducive to getting lots of reading an knitting done. The book I am reading while knitting this intensely red sweater is, appropriately enough, A Perfect Red. It is nonfiction that promises to engage like fiction. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and the latter always leaves me wishing I’d read some meaty, abstruse tome that engages only in its ability to reveal the author’s mania for his or her topic. What is your preferred brand of nonfiction?