Category: Nonfiction

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…

This book had me grinning from the preface, which quotes HV Morton (“I have gone round England like a magpie picking up any bright thing that pleased me.”) and calls this book a “linguistic travelogue” (pp xii, xiii). The first chapter continued along excitingly: I’d heard of the Welsh town with the longest place-name in…

The subtitle of this book—”Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade”—is more gossipy-seeming than the book itself is (though I think its gossipy bits, about Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin Dickinson, and Henry Ward Beecher’s possible affair with Elizabeth Tilton, are…

It’s easy to be enchanted by a city you’ve never been, and Gopnik was enamoured of Paris before he’d so much as visited it. His first trip only served to solidify his ideas of the city’s charms: “The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had…

Max Kozloff, in his introduction to this book of Perkis’s photographs, writes that these images are “pauses extracted from the current of ordinary viewing,” and also notes the way that often, what’s significant in a picture is “usually though not always set apart by a view through an aperture or enclosure” (p 9). It’s this…

I read this book in March but forgot to write about it at the time: it’s a collection of short news items by Fénéon, published anonymously in a French newspaper in 1906. They’re mostly police-blotter items, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, often worded in a clever or interesting way. On page 85, for example: “”M. Jules…

At the end of Persepolis, a teenage Marjane leaves Tehran for Austria. Persepolis 2 starts in Vienna, where Marjane finds herself living in a boarding house run by nuns. Marjane’s time in Austria isn’t easy, and she ultimately returns to Tehran, only to find that life there remains unbearably repressive. I liked the first book…

I was familiar with the premise of Plenty before I started reading it: after learning that the food we eat generally travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles before getting to us, two Canadians decided to embark on a year of local eating. For Smith and MacKinnon, “local” meant food that came from within 100 miles…

I picked this up at the library because it was so pleasingly thick, with wonderful color photos inside (something about the saturation of the color in these pictures really appeals). It’s a delight: Slater writes about food in a way that resonates with me. I like his focus on the daily ritual of cooking and…