Category: Nonfiction

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,…

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…

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…

I wasn’t aware of the existence of this book until I found a copy in a little free library near home, and as far as memoirs by musicians go, Carrie Brownstein’s is still my favorite, but I’m glad to have read this too. Beth Ditto talks about her childhood in small-town Arkansas, and growing up…

I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book since it first came out in 2015, and only recently learned that an updated edition was released in 2021; I figured I might as well finally check it out. This book is maybe more firmly in the self-help genre than I was expecting, and some of the…

In the nine chapters of Underground, Will Hunt talks about his personal fascination with underground spaces and their larger historical/cultural significances in various places and times through history, from caves where Paleolithic people painted images or created sculptures to NYC subway tunnels and the people who explore them and/or write graffiti in them. He travels…

Savage Gods is a book about writing and a book about being stuck and a book about trying to figure things out. Kingsnorth writes about how he and his wife, Jyoti, bought a house and some land in Ireland because he wanted to feel connected to a place, and because he thought “that the work…

Before reading Nineteen Reservoirs, I knew a little about the Croton reservoir system that brings some water to New York City—I knew there used to be a reservoir where the New York Public Library at Bryant Park is now, and I’ve walked up the spiraling stairs of the High Bridge Water Tower (and across High…

This book is definitely an academic text rather than a general history of the subway, and as such I’m not really the intended audience—and the fact that I read this while home sick with covid probably doesn’t help with my retention of the subject matter. But I nevertheless enjoyed this study of “how the daily…

In the fourteen sections/chapters of Built, Roma Agrawal explores various aspects of structural engineering and the built environment, sometimes from a personal perspective and sometimes from a more historical one. Early in the book, Agrawal describes her background: she initially went to university to study physics, then fell in love with engineering and became a…