Category: Nonfiction
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Waiting for the Weekend by Witold RybczynskiViking, 1991
Despite the title, and despite the fact that much of this book tells the story of how the weekend as we know it came into being, Waiting for the Weekend isn’t just about Saturday and Sunday and how they got that way. It also examines larger questions of leisure: what is leisure, anyhow? And how…
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Irving Penn: Small Trades by Virginia A. Heckert and Anne LacosteGetty Publications, 2009
When I quoted a passage from Proust about the “litanies of the small trades”, Carol mentioned this book of Irving Penn’s photographs of workers in Paris (and also New York and London) from 1950 and 1951. I’d mostly known about Penn’s fashion work or portraits of celebrities and society people (I’m thinking of pictures like…
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Bluets by Maggie NelsonWave Books, 2009
I don’t know whether to call Bluets poetry or nonfiction: it is a book-length essay, but a poetic one; it’s a series of 240 “propositions,” like Pascal’s Pensées (from which the book takes its epigraph), each ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. Whatever you want to call it, I was enchanted by…
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Silk Parachute by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Megan mentioned this book back in March, saying she’d read a review of it that made her think she’d like it, and wondering if I’d heard of McPhee. Since he writes for the New Yorker, and I’m one of those New Yorker subscribers who reads every single article, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to…
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The Happiness Project by Gretchen RubinHarperCollins, 2009
As I said in this post, happiness is the life goal that makes the most sense to me, more than success, more than achievement, more than, well, just about anything else. But how do you go about being happy? Some people would say your happiness is determined by external factors, and others would say it’s…
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Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table by Nigel SlaterFourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2007
I bought this book in a Whole Foods in London a few years ago, but hadn’t gotten around to reading it ’til now. I love Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries for the really vivid and satisfyingly descriptive way he writes about food. This book has some of that, like when, at the very beginning, he describes…
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Thames: The Biography by Peter AckroydDoubleday, 2008 (originally Chatto & Windus, 2007)
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…
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The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia WoolfFrank Hallman, 1975
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…
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The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon GarfieldHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 (originally Faber and Faber, 2008)
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…
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Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table by Ruth ReichlRandom House, 2002 (originally 2001)
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…