Category: Nonfiction

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…

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…

In Tubes, Andrew Blum tells the story of when he “decided to visit the Internet”—and what he found there. At the start of the book Blum says that he, like many people, didn’t really think much about the physical structure of the Internet—until one day when a squirrel chewing on wires in a Brooklyn backyard…

I suspect that Alibis is the sort of book whose pleasure it would be good to prolong, the kind of book where it would be satisfying to read an essay a day and reflect on each one, because there is without doubt lots to reflect on here. That isn’t what I did—I started reading slowly,…

I saw Jeanette Winterson read excerpts from this book back in March, and it was satisfying to recognize certain passages&#8212like the part where she talks about how Mrs Winterson, her adopted mother, read Jane Eyre aloud but bowdlerized the ending, improvising in the style of Charlotte Brontë. Mrs Winterson figures large in this book, as…

Summer is my least favorite season: I don’t do so well with heat and humidity, which are pretty much the defining characteristics of summer in New York. Meanwhile, stores and office buildings and subway cars are over-air-conditioned in over-compensation, so I feel like I spend my time either sweltering or freezing. Summer has its pleasures,…

I was reading this book on the train last night, and the woman next to me asked if I was an artist—because I was reading a book about color. “No, just interested,” I said, and then she asked about the subtitle, which is “How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World.” “So, how…

I started this book feeling a little grumpy: when I finish reading a novel and pick up a work of nonfiction, it requires a little adjustment—and maybe this is especially true when switching from a novel to episodic nonfiction like this book. Eating started not as a book but as a recipe column in the…

So. Hi again. It’s February, and it’s been nearly a month since I last posted here. During that time period I moved (not far: from Park Slope proper to the edge of Park Slope/Windsor Terrace). There was much packing, much unpacking, and much packing-and-unpacking-related angst. There was not much reading around moving day: my brain…