Category: Nonfiction
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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,…
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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…