Book notes

Category: Nonfiction

  • Travels in Siberia by Ian FrazierFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

    Siberia: you think “big,” you think “cold,” you think “isolation,” maybe you think “exile” or “gulag.” You probably don’t think “place I’d like to travel across by car,” but Ian Frazier did. He actually took five trips to Siberia over the course of sixteen years, not just the trans-Siberian drive he writes about in the…

  • Cooking Interlude: The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman

    The idea of The Food Matters Cookbook is simple: eat fewer animal products and processed foods; eat more whole grains, nuts, legumes, fruits and vegetables. There are lots of reasons you might want to eat this way, and Bittman mentions a few in his introduction (health, ethics, environment), but this really is a cookbook, not…

  • Night Bloom: A Memoir by Mary CappelloBeacon Press, 1998

    Family histories, family secrets, family gardens: a great-grandfather who had an affair, a grandfather who was a cobbler who gardened and wrote, a father who beats his two sons. Silences and gaps and a family transplanted, but also a family making things grow, planting hedges and flowers and herbs. In this book Cappello writes about…

  • The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff NicholsonRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2008

    Despite its (fairly frequent) snarkiness, and despite the fact that several sections read like strings of facts or anecdotes connected only loosely, I did enjoy this book, which is as much about Nicholson’s own walking experiences and philosophy as it is about, as the subtitle puts it, “The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism.”…

  • Cooking Interlude: More from Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson

    Having spent some more time with this cookbook, I can now share some general things I do and don’t like about it. For starters: every bulleted list in this book (and there are many of them) uses hearts as bullet points. This gets old really quickly. Another small annoyance: all recipes in this book that…

  • Cooking Interlude: Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson

    This weekend I’d been thinking that I’d go on a 15-mile walk on Staten Island on Sunday with a group of like-minded folks who enjoy city-walks in all kinds of weather. But when this morning came, I changed my mind: I didn’t feel like getting up early, and the arch of one of my feet…

  • French Milk by Lucy KnisleyTouchstone (Simon & Schuster), 2008 (originally Epigraph Publishing, 2007)

    In December 2006/January 2007, Lucy Knisley took a six-week trip to Paris with her mother to celebrate her mother’s fiftieth birthday and Lucy’s twenty-second. French Milk is Knisley’s travel journal from that trip, and it’s a pleasing combination of photos, text, and drawings (Knisley is a cartoonist). I love all the Parisian details of this…

  • A Week at the Airport by Alain de BottonVintage Books, 2010 (Originally Profile Books, 2009)

    This short but satisfying book, which features (really pleasing) photographs by Richard Baker, is the story of de Botton’s week as “writer-in-residence” at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. He explores the airport and its environs, from the Sofitel hotel where he’s staying for the week to the office of the CEO of British Airways, and talks to…

  • The rest of Psychogeography

    In “South Downs Way,” Will Self writes about how he has “taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography” (69). Which is a mouthful, and perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, but also kind of excellent: he’s walking, in part, to remind…

  • Psychogeography: Words by Will Self, Pictures by Ralph SteadmanBloomsbury, 2007

    Though I didn’t go to any events at the Conflux Festival this year, it nevertheless seemed like the weekend of the festival would be an apt weekend to start reading this book, which I checked out from the library a while ago. The festival, which used to be called Psy.Geo.Conflux, is centered on psychogeography, a…