Category: Nonfiction

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…

In Women, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis looks at US history from colonial times onwards and highlights the many moments when sexism, racism, classism, or some combination of all three prevented various progressive social movements from reaching their full potential. With solidarity, Davis argues, societal transformation is possible; without it, things only get so…

I didn’t realize when I requested this slim book of essays from the library that all nine pieces in it are also in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, which I’ve been meaning to read since, um, 2013 but haven’t yet, but that’s OK: Perec is great, and I find small books like this charming.…

Sticker is a “memoir in 20 stickers”: twenty short essays that range in timespan and topic from the Mr. Yuk stickers of Henry Hoke’s early childhood (adorning bottles of cleaning supplies under the sink) to a “Hilton Head” HH bumper sticker that also makes Hoke think of his own initials, and of “Heil Hitler”, and…

The Fire Next Time consists of two essays, one short and the other longer, both a mix of the personal and the more general, both about being Black in America. I’d read part of the longer piece in The New Yorker, and it made me want to read the whole thing. The first piece (the…

I think I knew I was going to love this book from Macfarlane’s description of it in his author’s note, in which he says the book is about “people and place” and the “relationship between paths, walking and the imagination” and “the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we…

I read and really liked James Attlee’s book on moonlight, Nocturne, back in 2010, and I think it was after that when I spotted this book in a secondhand shop in either Cambridge or London and decided I needed to buy it. I’ve never been to Oxford, but I nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of…

I’m sure I’d read at least parts of A Room of One’s Own before, but I’m not sure if I’d read the whole thing. Having just read Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, which quotes repeatedly from this and exists in part in relation to it, I figured I should read it in its entirety. So, right:…

I like the three-act structure of White Magic a lot—how Washuta plays with dramatic structure, the idea of beginning/middle/end, the idea of the three parts of a magic trick as described in the movie The Prestige (the pledge, the turn, the prestige). As far as the individual essays, there are some I love, and some…