Essay mini reviews today, plus exciting news from the wonderful Shelleyrae @ Book'd Out: the Nonfiction Reader Challenge is back! Annie Dillard's 1977 Holy the Firm is a brief book, more like an extended essay. From 1975, Dillard lived in a one-room cabin on an island at Puget Sound for two years. It seemed like... Continue Reading →
Annie Dillard’s Nonfiction: Teaching a Stone to Talk & An American Childhood
Reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last year was one of those infrequent, world-altering reading experiences for me. Exciting, then, to realize what a back catalog of nonfiction Dillard has. I read Teaching a Stone to Talk, an essay collection, last year as well. I find her writing worlds apart from any other author I... Continue Reading →
Paula Fox’s Vignettes of Childhood
Book review: Borrowed Finery, by Paula Fox (Amazon / Book Depository) For years I assumed responsibility for all that happened in my life, even for events over which I had not the slightest control. It was not out of generosity of mind or spirit that I did so. It was a hopeless wish that I... Continue Reading →
Vignettes Both Light and Dark from a Food Writer’s Childhood
Book review: Toast, by Nigel Slater (Amazon / Book Depository) “If you really want to, dear,’ was my mother’s answer for anything I wanted to do that she would rather I didn’t. This was her stock answer to my question: Can I make a fruit sundae? By make I meant assemble. My fruit sundae was... Continue Reading →
Childhood Scenes from the Tent Revival Circuit
Book review: Holy Ghost Girl, by Donna M. Johnson (Amazon / Book Depository) [The tent] gathered and sheltered us from a world that told us we were too poor, too white trash, too black, too uneducated, too much of everything that didn’t matter and not enough of anything that did. Society, or at least the... Continue Reading →
Nonfiction November Week 3: Be The Expert/Ask the Expert/Become the Expert
Week 3: (Nov. 12 to 16) – (Julie @ JulzReads): Three ways to join in this week! You can either share three or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to... Continue Reading →
Writing Her Grandparents’ Lives and a Memoir of Childhood
Book review: On Sunset, by Kathryn Harrison (Amazon Book Depository) Never mind that we live in Los Angeles and that I was born in 1961; my childhood belongs to my mother's parents, who, in the way of old people, have returned themselves to their pasts, taking me along. Author Kathryn Harrison writes a memoir of... Continue Reading →
Scenes from a Panic
Book review: Little Panic, by Amanda Stern (Amazon / Book Depository) I am always in the future somehow, separated from my body, and it’s from there I feel sad for the moment I’m living. Soon this moment will be gone; it will turn into another moment that will go, and I think I must be... Continue Reading →
Moving, Hopeful Writing on Growing Up Under Control and Getting Away
Book review: Apocalypse Child, by Flor Edwards Amazon I have no memory of my ancestry or record of my lineage; there is only Father David...When I picture my family tree, I see Mom...Dad...and my siblings - too many to count on two hands. When I envision my ancestors I see faraway Nordic countries where fjords... Continue Reading →
Making Light of a Soviet Childhood
Book review: Everything is Normal, by Sergey Grechishkin Book Depository Railways and trains in Russia have always been much more than just pragmatic modes of getting from point A to point B. For a Russian soul, a never-ending train journey across the empty vastness of its land is a state of mind, a meditation, an... Continue Reading →
The Boy Next Door, the Past, and a Sense of Place
Book review: Riverine, by Angela Palm (Amazon / Book Depository) Angela Palm grew up in rural Indiana, in a house built in a dried-out riverbed created by redirecting the Kankakee River, their little town not even designated on maps. Next door lived a boy named Corey, and they had the typical girl-and-boy-next-door relationship, into their adolescence. They... Continue Reading →
A Light in the Darkest Places
Book review: The Only Girl in the World, by Maude Julien (Amazon / Book Depository) My father is convinced that the mind can achieve anything. Absolutely anything: it can overcome every danger and conquer every obstacle. But to do this requires long, rigorous training away from the impurities of this dirty world. He’s always saying,... Continue Reading →