Book notes

Category: Nonfiction

  • Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

    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…

  • The Outermost House by Henry Beston

    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 by Gretchen McCulloch

    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…

  • Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma

    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…

  • Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

    The reading/event for this book that Allie Brosh did with Powell’s Books on Zoom was one of the best things that happened in September, but it took me until now to actually read the copy of the book that I’d purchased—I think I was saving it for Christmas vacation reading? Anyway: I am delighted to…

  • Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic

    Continuing with the theme of “books I bought while traveling but hadn’t read yet”: when I opened my copy of Dime-Store Alchemy, I found the receipt and was reminded that I bought this at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco in December 2012. Nearly eight years after having bought it, I can say that I…

  • My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

    I bought a copy of My Family and Other Animals at Brattleboro Books in Vermont years ago, based (I think) on nothing more than the colorful cover. As is often the case with books I buy, it took me longer than intended to actually get around to reading it, but wow I’m glad I finally…

  • Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

    I’ve never read any of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels, and I basically only read this book because my boyfriend checked it out from the library and read enough passages from it to me to make me intrigued about the book as a whole. I am not at all sure that I want to read any of…

  • Mudlark by Lara Maiklem

    When I read about Mudlark in the New Yorker, I immediately knew I wanted to read it: a memoir about finding stuff in the mud along the Thames foreshore? Yes please! And now that I’ve read it, I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed it as much as I expected to, which is to say,…

  • The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction by Pink Dandelion

    Although I went to a Quaker high school that had Silent Meeting every week, and although I’ve had a few periods of sporadically attending meeting for worship at Brooklyn Monthly Meeting as an adult, before reading this book I didn’t know much about the history of Quakerism, or about current Quaker practice in areas other…