Category: Nonfiction

Pondlife is a book made of journal entries that Al Alvarez wrote between 2002 and 2011, a period of time covering much of his seventies and reaching into his eighties. It’s about swimming (which Alvarez was doing year-round, outdoors, mostly in the ponds at Hampstead Heath) and also about aging (increasingly so as the book…

I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading Fun Home, given that I tend to like graphic memoirs, but I’m pleased that my boyfriend had it checked out of the library and finished it before it was due, which gave me time to read it, too. It’s an engrossing…

I liked this collection of fifteen short essays, but probably would have liked it more if I were more familiar with some of the subjects Ducornet is writing about. (I haven’t seen any David Lynch films, for example, and while I appreciated the language and images of “Witchcraft by a Picture,” I also felt a…

I don’t read very many memoirs in this style (by which I mean, I guess, more conversational than literary), but this one was fun, particularly because my boyfriend recently introduced me to The Guild, which we’ve been watching on Netflix and which I’ve been liking a lot so far. Felicia Day (you may know her…

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…