Category: Nonfiction

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…

Persepolis is a smart and poignant memoir of an Iranian girlhood, of life in Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq War. It’s a graphic novel whose balance of words and images struck me as just right (which is to say: it’s pretty text-heavy); the art is bold and black-and-white and totally satisfying.…

Really smart and pleasing: I’ve so loved reading this book on my train rides to and from work this week. de Botton examines the motives and logic of travel: why we leave home, and what leaving home might teach us. The book is nine chapters, each covering a place or places and each with a…

Smart and well-researched and thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes scattered: why is it that we get a detailed description of how letterpress printing works in the prologue, but don’t learn the names of the tools engravers use until page 238? Still, I was happily engrossed in the story of Bewick and his world: the streets and…

As an introduction to the test format, this book is OK, but it could be much better-edited: there are some errors, both in the text and in the practice tests. Example: on one practice test, the book says that the solutions of -x2 = 2x-15 are x=-3, 5 because in solving the problem, the author…

This is the third book from the American Lives Series that I’ve read: I might be on something of a literary nonfiction kick lately, memoir especially, the stories people tell about themselves and how those stories get told. This one is about the summer Skoyles was 16, 1965: living in Queens, learning Manhattan. It’s about…

I was more interested in the “wilderness” part of the story than in the “parenthood” part, but of course they’re intertwined. Johnson writes about moving from Michigan out to Idaho, where his grandparents have a ranch, and where he and his wife, Amy, will finish a cabin they’ve been building up on a hilltop: no…

I first read about What Becomes You in a post on the University of Nebraska Press blog back in April, and was pleased to find that the Brooklyn Public Library had ordered a copy. It’s a smart, well-written book, a memoir in two parts: the first part by Aaron, born Sarah, and the second by…