Category: Nonfiction

(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…

(by Rowan Jacobsen) Given the choice between chocolate and something else (like: chocolate cake or lemon cake; chocolate candy or sour candy), I usually choose the “something else.” But I like chocolate too, and reading this book makes me excited to try some of the single-origin/bean-to-bar chocolates that Jacobsen writes about (and in fact, I…

(by Jessica Fern) I feel like a few years ago it seemed like everyone was reading books about attachment theory and its application to romantic relationships in adulthood, but I didn’t read any of those because pop-psychology is generally not my thing and also because I am not particularly interested in relationship advice with a…

(by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling) I hadn’t heard of the Free Town Project before I started reading this book for nonfiction book club, and I also didn’t know a lot about bears in New Hampshire before reading this (though when I was a kid and my mom and I were somewhere near Mount Washington one summer, another…

(by Maira Kalman) I read this aloud to/with my husband over the course of an afternoon and evening, and I think I enjoyed it more this way than I would have if I’d just read it on my own. Reading it aloud with someone else encouraged me to pause after each vignette (there are 39…

(by Nina MacLaughlin) This is a book to read in one day—maybe ideally in one sitting, though I started it on my morning commute and finished it at home in the evening. It’s a book to read on or near the winter solstice, on a day when it gets dark early (sunset here in NYC…

(photographs by Michael L. Horowitz, text by James P. Holtje) Last month my husband and I went to an event at the 92nd Street Y where Michael Horowitz and Jim Holtje talked about this book (and about the larger subject of America’s “industrial past, present, and future”) with Paul Krugman and Esther Fuchs. I should…

(by Matthew Desmond) This book (which was published in 2016 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017) follows eight families/households in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. These families/households either have experienced/are experiencing eviction, or are living under threat of it. Some live in Milwaukee’s (mostly Black) North Side; others live in a…

(by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis) These 26 letters by Proust to his upstairs neighbors (most are to Mme Williams; a few are to her husband) were a quick and pleasing read. There are photographic reproductions of some of the letters interspersed throughout the text and wow I do not envy anyone trying to…