Category: Nonfiction

(by Hanif Abdurraqib) In her introduction to this essay collection, Eve L. Ewing writes that this “is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, Black life and Black death.” Many of the essays use music as a through-line or a jumping-off point, but the book isn’t a collection of music criticism per…

(by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker) Some parts of this 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics have definitely not aged well (the parts about race and skin color, the parts about women’s bodies) and some parts are about things that I don’t know enough about to have opinions on (costumes…

(by Kim Phillips-Fein) This was an interesting book to read after having seen the documentary Drop Dead City back in May. The book and the movie cover the same time period/events (the fiscal crisis in 1970s New York City) but each has its own slant, the slant of the book being that the crisis gave…

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan…

(by Nicola Twilley) There are so many interesting/unexpected/fun facts and anecdotes in this book (subtitle: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves); I definitely could not shut up about all the stuff I was learning while I was reading it. Twilley takes readers on a global tour of the largely-unseen spaces of the…

(by Jon Krakauer) Disaster/survival nonfiction is not generally my genre—in fact, I think this book may be the only one of its sort that I’ve ever read. This is an account of a 1996 guided expedition to climb Mount Everest that the author was on that ended in tragedy, with multiple people dying on the…

(by Bill Buford) I definitely groaned when I saw that this book was my non-fiction book club’s choice for June—I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about English football hooligans in the 1980s. But as it turned out, I actually liked this one. Buford’s writing is very good, and I like how the structure and…

(by Nina MacLaughlin) There are, for sure, things I like about summer: evening walks, swimming in the ocean, stepping out the door without having to think about whether I’m wearing enough clothing. But also, this is not really my season. I’m a pale redhead who requires lots of sunscreen; heat and humidity are challenging for…

(by Matt Alt) In the introduction to this book, Alt explains that it’s about how certain Japanese exports had an outsize global impact— or, as he puts it, how these exports “transformed our tastes, our dreams, and eventually our realities as we incorporated them into our lives.” Each chapter is about a different item or…

(by André Aciman) I read Alibis a few years ago and really liked it; though that was a series of linked essays and this is more of a straight-up memoir, the vibes are similar: Proustian, readerly, writerly. I love Aciman’s prose: there are sentences in this book that I felt I had to stop and…