Category: Nonfiction

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…

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.…