Category: Nonfiction

This was a good book to read while home sick with a cold: fun, funny, and not too mentally taxing. Shea, who says in the introduction to this book that he collects words the way other people collect tangible and/or valuable things, read the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in its entirety, and…

I don’t have kids or want kids, but this parenting memoir was a whole lot of fun. It’s episodic and loosely chronologically/thematically structured, and I would maybe have liked more of a narrative arc, but it’s well-written and very New York-y and often laugh-out-loud funny, like when Halliday describes breastfeeding on the subway, looking up…

Near the end of Conundrum, Jan Morris writes about walking through Casablanca on the eve of her sex change operation as feeling like she was about to pay “a visit to a wizard,” like she was “a figure of fairy tale, about to be transformed” (119). And, as in some fairy tales, what she is…

I read and liked Rubin’s previous book, The Happiness Project, in 2010; in a lot of ways, this book is more of the same. Like that book, this one is organized by month, and each month has a theme. (This time around, Rubin sticks with the school year instead of the calendar year, so there…

More Baths Less Talking, which I decided I wanted to read after reading Stefanie’s post about it on So Many Books, contains fifteen short pieces that were originally published in the Believer magazine between May 2010 and December 2011. The pieces are from Nick Hornby’s running “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column, and they’re really great.…

I like Lucy Knisley’s work a whole lot, and this was a quick and fun read. It’s a travelogue/graphic-memoir of a trip to Europe that Knisley took in 2011, when she was 27, and includes her travels to/in Norway (Bergen), Sweden (Stockholm), Germany (Berlin) and France (Beaune, Angoulême, Royan, and Paris). The trip is partly…

This book of photographs, with a foreword by Mark Singer and an afterword by Elisabeth Biondi, consists of eighty pictures that were taken while Plachy was the photographer for The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, plus one that wasn’t. The pictures are a mix of color and black & white, and are mostly…

My Body Is a Book of Rules is a memoir in essay form, but these essays aren’t just straight essays: there’s one (A Cascade Autobiography) that’s broken into sections and interspersed with other pieces; another is an academic paper about the use of the phrase “hooking up” by college-aged men and women, annotated after the…

The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn’t to say this book is bad, just that it didn’t…

This memoir, which consists of named chapters/linked pieces, some of which were previously published as standalone works, covers a lot of territory. It’s about obsessions, how they can shape a person’s life, how they can give structure/meaning/purpose, but also about the obvious flip-side of that: about how their all-consuming nature can be negative, can be…