Category: Nonfiction
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City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William DalrymplePenguin, 2003 (Originally HarperCollins, 1993)
One thing about City of Djinns, which is about a year that William Dalrymple spent in Delhi with his wife in his twenties, is that it suffers for me a bit by comparison to Tamara Shopsin’s wonderful Mumbai New York Scranton, which I read in February and loved. It’s not a fair comparison, really: both…
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Rookie Yearbook One, edited by Tavi GevinsonDrawn & Quarterly, 2012
Rookie Yearbook One features highlights from Rookie’s first school year of existence, September 2011 to May 2012. Though I am definitely older than the intended audience (it’s for teenagers; I’m 32) it was still a satisfying read. It’s a mixture of advice pieces, personal essays, and other stuff from a mixture of teen and adult…
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Urban Tantra by Barbara CarrellasCelestial Arts (Crown/Random House), 2007 (Originally 2005)
This book, whose subtitle is “Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century,” is refreshingly queer-friendly, kink-friendly, poly-friendly, and body-positive. I’m skeptical about some of the concepts Carrellas presents, but that didn’t really keep me from enjoying the book. Take chakras: I can see the usefulness of them as metaphor/visualization technique, but I’m less convinced about things…
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An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History by Cynthia ZarinBorzoi (Knopf), 2013
A number of images and moments recur in more than one of the twelve chapters that make up this memoir: a film with a scene in which an actress wears yellow stockings, snowflakes on the collar of a violet coat, a tube of red lipstick found in a different coat pocket, a bathroom with a…
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Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy KnisleyFirst Second, 2013
I read Relish in the middle of a week-long vacation that started with amazing food in New Orleans (still-warm house-made potato chips! fried oyster slider! maple sriracha donut with candied thyme! lamb neck and beet green curry! condensed-milk cake with chicory ice cream and Meyer lemon sauce!) and proceeded to less-than-amazing food on Grand Cayman…
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Mumbai New York Scranton by Tamara ShopsinScribner (Simon & Schuster), 2013
This book starts with an arrival in a place far from home and ends with a homecoming of sorts, a return to a familiar place and family and a feeling of normalcy, though it isn’t the book’s opening trip to India that Shopsin’s returning from. (The three cities of the book’s title are indeed visited…
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Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker by Susan HoweNew Directions, 2013
I. I’ve never seen any of Chris Marker’s films, but this book made me want to. (You can watch La Jetée online, or it’s available on DVD, along with Marker’s 1982 film, Sans Soleil.) (I’ve never read Moby-Dick, either, and this book made me want to do that as well.) II. Howe’s book is mostly…
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Some Remarks by Neal StephensonWilliam Morrow (HarperCollins), 2012
I checked this book out of the library for my boyfriend, but I renewed it when he was done because I was curious, and then I grabbed it on my way out the door one day when I wasn’t sure what I was in the mood to read: I’d recently finished reading a novel and…
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Artful by Ali SmithThe Penguin Press, 2013
The flap copy says that “Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness,” and that’s a solid description of this smart and satisfying book, which is actually a series of lectures that Smith gave at Oxford in January and February…
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La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams by Georges PerecTranslated by Daniel Levin BeckerMelville House, 2012
La Boutique Obscure is Georges Perec’s dream journal, a record of 124 dreams from the period from May 1968 to August 1972, complete with an index (which is well worth reading: it’s got entries like “Fictitious names (?)” and “Retracing the same path” and “Remembering and forgetting” and “Dreaming about dreaming, or about waking up,…