Category: Nonfiction
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Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight by James AttleeThe University of Chicago Press, 2011
In Nocturne, James Attlee really pleasingly tells the stories of his various moon-focused journeys. He’s interested in exploring the role of moonlight in art/culture/life, both historically and now, in a time when light pollution means people in general see less of the moon and are probably less aware of the moon than in the past.…
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Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan HillProfile Books, 2010 (originally 2009)
Mm, books. Like, apparently, a lot of other people, I have a habit of acquiring books and then letting them sit on my shelves, unread, while I read something else. I don’t actually buy a ton of books—I do buy some that I’m particularly excited about, and I’m definitely guilty of, say, buying paperbacks at…
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The Cows by Lydia DavisSarabande Books, 2011
The front cover of this chapbook features a cow in a field, looking stolid and a little bit curious: ears wide apart and forward, one front hoof planted a little ahead of the other. The grass is green, and so are the trees behind it. The back cover is a continuation of the same picture,…
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That This by Susan HoweNew Directions, 2010
What is there to say about death, about absence and loss and the space death makes in life? “Starting from nothing with nothing when everything else has been said,” Howe writes, early in “The Disappearance Approach,” an essay about the sudden death of her husband, Peter Hare (11). Then she quotes Sarah Edwards, writing to…
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The New Brooklyn Cookbook by Melissa Vaughan and Brendan VaughanWilliam Morrow (HarperCollins), 2010
This book’s subtitle is “Recipes and Stories from 31 Restaurants That Put Brooklyn on the Culinary Map:” I’ve lived in Brooklyn for coming up on seven years now, and of those 31 restaurants, I’ve been to exactly three: applewood (literally down the block from where I lived for five and a half years, great food,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.”…
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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…