Book notes

Category: Nonfiction

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

    (by Isabel Wilkerson) I missed this month’s nonfiction book club meeting because my husband and I had tickets to see Ethan Lipton’s “We Are Your Robots” in Brooklyn (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I read the book anyway because it seemed like something I probably should have read already. This book came out 2020 and…

  • Heart: A History

    (by Sandeep Jauhar) I don’t normally gravitate to books about medicine/medical history, but someone chose this for nonfiction book club and I enjoyed it. Jauhar walks readers through the history of human understanding of/theories of the heart and circulatory system and various heart-related medical advances, while also telling the story of his own relationship with…

  • Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

    (by Danielle Dutton) In “Writing Advice,” a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn’t, one writer tells another to “write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages” as opposed to “writing little books that nobody reads.” I, for one, quite like…

  • New Yorkers

    (by Craig Taylor) Near the start of this book, Craig Taylor writes about how he “wanted to craft a book about New York in the twenty-first century, filled with the voices and sounds and places and people of New York, the life of the city right now,” and I think the book definitely succeeds at…

  • Strangers to Ourselves

    (by Rachel Aviv) This book, whose subtitle is “Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” takes the form of the psychiatric case study and goes somewhere a little different with it. In the book’s six sections, the author explores six different people’s experiences of mental illness, including her own (she stopped eating when she…

  • Glitter and Concrete

    (by Elyssa Maxx Goodman) This book, which looks at the history of drag in New York City from the 1860s to 2023, was an interesting introduction to a subject I didn’t know a lot about. I’ve seen performances that incorporate drag and drag aesthetics (Justin Vivian Bond as Kiki in the cabaret duo Kiki and…

  • More

    (by Molly Roden Winter) This isn’t a memoir to read for lyrical prose (not that the writing is bad), but rather, a memoir to read for glimpses into someone else’s life, particularly glimpses of raw and vulnerable moments where someone is trying to figure shit out, and may or may not be succeeding. I don’t…

  • If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

    (by Justin Gregg) In this book, whose subtitle is “What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity,” Justin Gregg uses a Nietzsche quotation about cattle as a jumping-off point to explore the differences between animal intelligence/cognition and human intelligence/cognition, and the question of whether we can say that human intelligence is better. (Spoiler alert: Gregg thinks…

  • Crossings

    (by Ben Goldfarb) Another month, another really interesting read thanks to nonfiction book club. I didn’t know anything about road ecology before reading this, but Goldfarb does a great job of introducing the topic and walking readers through the effects of roads on different kinds of animals in different places, chapter by chapter. There are…

  • What Fresh Hell Is This?

    (by Heather Corinna) I am not really a fan of surprises. So when I realized that I felt like I was missing some basic info about what to expect in the coming years in terms of perimenopause and menopause, I figured I should probably try to learn some things. Hence this book, whose subtitle is…