I enjoy historical fiction. In fact, I believe I have learned more history from fiction books than I ever learned from a textbook. Recently, I read One Came Home by Amy Timberlake, and it was filled with strange but true facts about, of all things, passenger pigeons.
The story takes place in Wisconsin in 1871 when an incredibly huge nesting of passenger pigeons occurred. According to records from that time, the nesting covered 850 square miles -- a conservative estimate, according to the notes! Some experts speculated that all the existing passenger pigeons were part of that nesting. The story is full of details about what that many birds can do to a piece of land and how huge groups of people followed the flock to "harvest" the birds and their eggs.
Of course, there is a lot more to the story (see my Read Like a Librarian blog), but it just struck me that books are full of so much more than the story, and a reader never knows what he or she might learn when they pick up something new.
