So You're a Little Sad, So What?: Nice Things to Say to Yourself on Bad Days and Other Essays, by Alicia Tobin (Amazon / Book Depository) Alicia Tobin is a comedian and podcaster based in Vancouver. In her first but decidedly polished essay collection, she writes about self-esteem, bad boyfriends, working in retail and as... Continue Reading →
Slice-of-Life Stories From A Random Day
Book review: One Day, by Gene Weingarten (Amazon / Book Depository) Select an ordinary day at random, report it deeply, then tell it like it happened -- from midnight to midnight, the most basic, irreducible unit of human experience. Ideally, the more you'd learn, the more firmly you'd establish that in life, there's no such... Continue Reading →
Survivors’ Stories from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society
Book review: Before and After, by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate (Amazon / Book Depository) Author Lisa Wingate wrote a popular novel in 2017, Before We Were Yours, a fictionalized story about children adopted from the notorious Tennessee Children's Home Society ("TCHS"). Starting in the 1920s through 1950, a woman named Georgia Tann ran this "questionable"... Continue Reading →
More Funny Tales From the Quirky Life of John Hodgman
Book review: Medallion Status, by John Hodgman (Amazon / Book Depository) Comedian, author and podcaster John Hodgman's second memoir-in-essay collection, Medallion Status, is ostensibly built around his obsession with the loyalty program of the airline he calls "Beloved Airlines," and the travels, specifically for acting jobs, he's had in connection with earning those miles. It's... Continue Reading →
How Cooking Made Living Seem Possible
Book review: Midnight Chicken, by Ella Risbridger (Amazon / Book Depository) There is a German word, kummerspeck, that translates literally as 'grief-bacon,' and metaphorically as 'comfort eating'. This book is the grief-bacon book...This is the book I wanted to read when I was sad, but it's also a book for good days. I'm not going... Continue Reading →
‘My Favorite Murder’ Dual Memoir Tackles Mental Health and Personal Issues with Humor
Book review: Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered, by Karen Kilgariff & Georgia Hardstark (Amazon / Book Depository) We have gone from living inside your headphones to pouring ourselves out onto the page like a couple of Edna St. Vincent Millays. There aren't many podcasts that become phenomenons, but My Favorite Murder, styled as true... Continue Reading →
The Nostalgia of Coming Home When Everything’s Changed
Book review: Bettyville, by George Hodgman (Amazon / Book Depository) My friends worry that I am falling into a hole here, that this time away is really giving up, running away. Since I lost my job, I don’t know quite who it is I am now. Suddenly I feel older. In New York, my closet... Continue Reading →
The Many Phases of Michelle
Book review: Becoming, by Michelle Obama (Amazon / Book Depository) When you're First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes. Michelle Obama's life has had so many facets already: two Ivy League degrees, a successful career in corporate law, vice president of a hospital, nonprofit director, not to mention a mother, a role... 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 →
Elegies for the Dead She’s Known
Book review: The Baltimore Book of the Dead, by Marion Winik Book Depository People do not pass away. / They die / and then they stay. Poet and author Marion Winik opens this second volume of creative short elegies to departed people she's known, tinged with personal memoir, with those lines from Naomi Shihab Nye's poem... Continue Reading →
Life After Liquor: Essays On Quitting Drinking
Book review: Nothing Good Can Come from This, by Kristi Coulter Amazon Booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise. Kristi Coulter's essay "Enjoli", named after a perfume ad indicating women should be able to work and still keep it sexy for... Continue Reading →
Elegies for the Departed
Book review: The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, by Marion Winik (Amazon) After a creative writing assignment led her to thinking about dead people she'd known, poet and author Marion Winik explains that it was "as if tickets to a show had just gone on sale and all my ghosts were screeching up at the... Continue Reading →