Category: Nonfiction

In general I tend to really like illustrated/graphic memoirs, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. In this one, Alison Bechdel tells some stories from her life, organized by decade, through the lenses of 1) exercise/physical pursuits and 2) ideas about/struggles with self-transcendence. Tied to the latter, there is a lot about Buddhism…

A lot of the negative reviews of this book on Goodreads seem to be from people who had issues with the amount of swearing, sex (including queer sex), and bathroom emergencies in these twenty essays. Those things are all fine with me, but humor as a genre isn’t always my thing: it’s rare for this…

Near the end of Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey describes the desert as “desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, sparingly colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them as spiny, thorny, stunted and twisted as…

The eight chapters of this book correspond to the eight issues of a zine that Pagan Kennedy put out between the ages of 25 and 31 (she wrote this book when she was 32), and each chapter consists mostly of b&w reproductions of an issue of the zine itself, preceded by an introductory essay. As…

In this book’s prologue, Liz Phair explains that the book is about “the small indignities we all suffer daily, the silent insults to our system, the callous gestures we make toward one another” (4). These are everyday horror stories, for some definition of “everyday”: affairs, relationship troubles, performance mishaps, brushes with danger. As others have…

I’m probably not the target audience for this book—I’m not particularly looking for encouragement in creative pursuits—but my fiancé got a copy as a gift and I ended up picking it up from the shelf while waiting for a library hold on a different book to come in. Gilbert’s tone is conversational and engaging, and…

In the ten chapters of The Outermost House, Henry Beston writes about the year he spent living in a two-room cottage on the Atlantic-facing beach on Cape Cod in the 1920s. Many of the people on Goodreads who don’t like this book seem to wish it had more of a “plot,” but it isn’t that…

Because Internet is an excellent exploration of how people use language in online interactions, and how the conventions of online language and online social interaction more generally have shifted and are continuing to shift with time. It’s smart and funny and the kind of book where I kept pausing to tell my boyfriend things I’d…

I don’t remember when, where, or why I acquired a copy of this book, but I decided it might be interesting to read after having read A Tale for the Time Being earlier this month, since that novel and this book cover some of the same years in Japan’s history. I did recognize some of…