Category: Nonfiction

This book is rambling and fragmented and sometimes repetitive (like when Ackroyd mentions the 5000-year-old yews at Southwark on one page … and then mentions them again on the next page, without a difference of context or the addition of any new information), but it’s full of interesting facts and historical tidbits and images. One…

I first read this book back in 2006, saw it again at the library recently and thought, quite correctly, that it’d be satisfying to re-read. The start of the first essay, “The Docks of London,” made me think a little of Proust: the magic of names, the magic of place names especially. Woolf writes that…

At the start of this book, Garfield writes very much as a man, or maybe what I mean is that he writes from a certain place of cultural masculinity that is quite foreign to me, a separate spheres sort of world that I don’t normally much think about. I wonder how much of my inability…

For the first chapter, the tone of this memoir annoyed me: too pat, and too much dialogue, which I find a tricksy thing in nonfiction. It’s too distracting: I’m sitting on the R train reading and wondering if she really remembers what her first husband said on that day twenty-three years ago, if she wrote…

I got a free advance copy of this book via goodreads, and was excited to read it even after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s not-too-enthusiastic review in the New Yorker, and the plagiarism accusations in VQR (which I got to via TeleRead), and even Virginia Postrel’s review, in which she calls Free “a successful business speech between…

If I were to see a painting or sketch by Watteau in a museum, I’m not sure if it would catch my eye. I might look at it and think, “people, yawn,” and move on. I tend to like abstract art or minimalist art, art that is about color or shape, or else I like…

I was reading this book on a Brooklyn-bound F train one evening, and could tell that a man a few seats over was staring at the cover. He scrambled for a pen and wrote the title down on the paper shopping bag he was carrying, then stood up at the next stop and stood in…

Last month I saw Christine Borgman speak at Columbia, courtesy of the Scholarly Communication Program. After the talk I decided to read her book, which covers much of the same territory, in greater detail. Borgman starts by saying that “The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data-…

This book is really smart and satisfying; it’s an excellent blend of the personal and the historical and the philosophical. Early in the book, Solnit talks about walking’s place—or lack thereof—in our daily lives: walking as part of “the time inbetween,” “the time of walking to or from a place” as “uncluttered time,” appreciated by…