Felicity - when I am shelving books in my bookshop I put autobiographies-biographies-memoirs together unless the memoir is something like travel, in which case it goes there. BUT, I am unhappy at doing this because not only do I agree that it seems to be a separate species, but also customers who like true stories like memoirs but often not biographies. The reverse isn't true - people who like biographies generally like memoirs. However, I don't have unlimited space. On GR, I hadn't thought of it though.

Hmm. I don't know why my opinions should differ from others' so much. But to me, whether or not a memoir differs much from a biography, a biographer and a memoirist seem to belong to separate species, which is why the drop-down on the author page had given me pause.

I consider them the same genre. They're both accounts of the lives of real people.

Doesn't "biography" include autobiographies pretty much by definition?

I myself have always wondered why biography and memoir are together on the genre drop-down. I've never noticed any tendency of memoirists to go in as biographers, or vice versa. Documenting someone else's life and reflecting on your own seem very different to me.

Lisa, yeah, but when I clicked through to the shelves in question, they looked pretty substantially fiction. Maybe I should say the ratio is not more than 3:2!

Cait, There are quite a few nonfiction children's books, although they are not as common as children's fiction.

Now you made me curious. :) If the popular shelves are anything to go by, the fiction to nonfiction ratio appears to be about 3 to 2, actually. (Discarding the nongenre shelves like "own" and "library", assuming kids' books are always fiction, and counting popular shelves with book counts over 3700, it's 248997 fiction books to 168273 nonfiction books!)

SQLR, Good point. My F to NF ratio is about 10:1. That's rough, but probably about right & I don't think it's on the low side for most of GR. It also takes me about 1/10th the time to read most fiction books as it does to read most NF books. I generally am reading one of each.

I noticed that when I was updating profiles for Roy and Lesley Adkins, but for me it's symptomatic of how GR is geared more towards fiction than non-fiction (not a criticism--just an observation).

I'd love to know the ratio of f to n/f on members' shelves.

I've recently added details for Richard H. Lawson and Erich Auerbach and listed them both simply as "Nonfiction." Would Be Nice If the drop-down included an option for "lit-crit" or "literary criticism", since there are gobs of authors who write little else, and both "nonfiction" and "arts & photography" seem insufficiently descriptive in such cases.