Category: Nonfiction

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…

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…