Category: Nonfiction
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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,…
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On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra HorowitzScribner, 2013
Near the end of On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz says this about the walks she’s taken over the course of writing the book, and how they’ve changed her: “I have become, I fear, a difficult walking companion, liable to slow down and point at things. I can turn this off, but I love to have it…
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The Patagonian Hare by Claude LanzmannTranslated by Frank Wynne Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012(English translation originally Atlantic Books, 2012)
Claude Lanzmann knows how to get a reader’s attention: the first sentence of the first chapter of his memoir (originally published in French in 2009) is this: “The guillotine – more generally, capital punishment and the various methods of meting out death – has been the abiding obsession of my life” (1). He goes on…
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Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms by Richard ForteyKnopf, 2011
Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (which was originally published by HarperCollins in the UK in 2011, as Survivors) was an extraordinarily slow read for me, though I’m not sure how much I can blame the book for that. I started reading it while I was in England for work, which meant I started it at…
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Vintage Cakes by Julie RichardsonTen Speed Press (Crown/Random House), 2012
Vintage Cakes is the kind of book that should be really appealing to me. Julie Richardson, who owns Baker & Spice Bakery in Portland, Oregon, inherited the contents of an old filing cabinet from the previous bakery that was in the space Baker & Spice now inhabits. As she writes in the introduction to this…
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Lost New York by Marcia ReissPavilion Books, 2011
I’ve been living in NYC for twelve-ish years now: I came for college and didn’t leave. (During college I stayed in the city in the summers, mostly, though I did go to my mom’s house in Georgia for a stretch of one summer, and spent most of another summer living in Cambridge, MA.) I’ve finished…
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Swimming Studies by Leanne ShaptonBlue Rider Press (Penguin), 2012
In the last of the thirty pieces (some all text, some all images, some a mix of both) that make up Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton writes this: I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice, and breakup. […] I think about loving swimming the way…
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Meander: East to West, Indirectly, Along a Turkish River by Jeremy SealBloomsbury USA, 2012 (Originally Chatto & Windus, 2012)
I read about this book in an issue of Booklist that I picked up earlier this year: in a brief review, Gilbert Taylor calls this book, which is about Seal’s canoe trip along the length of the Meander River in 2008, a “charmingly mordant, twisting travelogue,” which was enough to make me want to pick…
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The Truck Food Cookbook by John T. EdgeWorkman Publishing, 2012
I picked this book up from the library after my boyfriend heard about it on NPR, and while I don’t like it enough to want to buy it, it was fun to read through. The subtitle, “150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels,” gives a pretty good idea of what you’re in…