Category: Nonfiction

In her introduction to this book of ten essays, Meghan Daum writes that when she was working on this book, she told people that it was “a book about sentimentality” whose pieces, she hoped, would “add up to a larger discussion about the way human experiences too often come with preassigned emotional responses” (4). She…

This book, which was originally published in German in 1978 (the first English translation was published in 1980) is Werner Herzog’s diary of his three-week walk from Munich to Paris in November and December 1974, which he undertook after hearing that his close friend, the film critic Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill. “I set off…

I wanted to love this book, but found the experience of reading it to be sort of a slog. I think part of the problem is that Beaumont is trying to do a whole lot here: he’s looking at the history of walking at night, mostly but not exclusively in London, from the early modern…

The eleven essays in this book all explore pain, in one way or another (or sometimes in several ways). All are well-written, some are structurally interesting, and I really liked some of them. The title essay, which is partly about Jamison’s job as a medical actor (presenting the symptoms of a disease/the story of a…

I think I’m probably not the ideal audience for Pico Iyer’s very short TED book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. That isn’t to say I didn’t find things to like in it, but I think it might have been better for people who haven’t tried any sort of sitting-in-silence practice at all…

The subtitle is no joke: this book is short, just 201 pages including the index and an extensive list of books for further reading, and its length was part of what made me pick it up, but may also have kept me from totally loving it. The thing is, Warner isn’t writing primarily about the…

The seven sections of Oranges don’t feel like they necessarily have to be in the order they’re in, which is maybe the only thing I didn’t like about this book: it sometimes felt a little disjointed. Still, this was a really interesting read and I kept telling my boyfriend various things I was learning about…

In October 1974, Georges Perec spent many hours over the course of three days (a Friday/Saturday/Sunday) sitting in cafés on the place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. This book, which was originally published in French in 1975, is the result. It’s divided into days, and into numbered sections within each day. Each day starts with the date,…

My boyfriend checked this book, which is a catalog that accompanied a 2001/2002 Bill Watterson show at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, out of the library and thought it’d be fun to read together. I think he was a little surprised that I didn’t have a strong connection to Calvin and Hobbes from…

I bought a copy of Ten Walks/Two Talks five years ago, after seeing the authors do a reading from it, but hadn’t actually read the whole book until now, despite the fact that I really like walking, New York, art that involves walking, and art that involves constraints, which basically guaranteed I would really like…