Category: Nonfiction

  • All the Wrong Places by Philip Connors

    All the Wrong Places is Philip Connors’s memoir of his early twenties in NYC and his struggles to understand/come to terms with his younger brother having taken his own life. Though he says he and his brother “weren’t close” as young adults, they were “an insesparable pair” in early childhood on their family’s farm in…

  • Just Kids by Patti Smith

    This is one of those books I’d been meaning to read for ages: I heard about it when it first came out, and then I was reminded of it again in 2015 when I read what Nick Hornby had to say about it in More Baths, Less Talking. Then I found a copy of it…

  • The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf, translated by Nina Bogin

    My husband makes fun of me for being drawn to short/small books on the new-books shelves at the library, but I don’t know, I appreciate concision, and I loved this very brief memoir from its very start. The back cover of the edition I read said this book is “Kristóf’s memoir of her childhood, her…

  • The Box (Second Edition) by Marc Levinson

    I probably would have appreciated a more pop-history version of this “history of containerization”, which makes the (prolonged) “argument that tumbling transport costs were critical in opening the way to what we now call globalization,” but I nevertheless learned a lot about shipping and shipping containers and ports and freight costs. Levinson sets the scene,…

  • Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky

    I bought this book at the gift shop of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and read most of it on a train from Venice to Florence; I’d thought, after reading Two Cities by Cynthia Zarin, that I should read something by Joseph Brodsky, and when I saw this in the gift shop it seemed the obvious…

  • Two Cities by Cynthia Zarin

    This book is part of the ekphrasis series put out by David Zwirner Books, and that word always makes me think of my freshman year of college, about a classroom with an instructor talking about Homer. I remember the instructor asking, rhetorically, what ekphrasis does and then I remember him answering: “it fucking interrupts the…

  • The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

    I’d been meaning to read this book since it came out in 2015, so when I found out that someone I know from work had chosen this for the first read of the new nonfiction book club he’s starting, I immediately put a hold on it at the library. (I love book clubs for either…

  • At Home by Bill Bryson

    At Home feels much more sprawling than the title might suggest—more sprawling, even, than the old parsonage in which Bill Bryson lives and from which the book takes its structure. Bryson is theoretically going room by room through the parsonage and describing the history of that sort of room (the kitchen, or the drawing room,…

  • Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin

    This is the third book by Gretchen Rubin that I’ve read (I read The Happiness Project back in 2010 and Happier at Home in 2015) and my favorite so far. In this one, Rubin talks about how an offhand remark by her eye doctor (she’s there for a case of pinkeye; the doctor mentions that…

  • Quiet by Susan Cain

    Susan Cain covers a lot of ground in Quiet (whose subtitle is “The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”). After starting with the idea that “where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum” might be “the single most important aspect of personality,” she goes on to explore what she calls “the Extrovert…