Where is your nonfiction section please.
Festival Days, by Jo Ann Beard It's a lofty goal, to imagine translating one's own personal experiences in a way that instructs and illuminates, moves and inspires, another human being. Jo Ann Beard is long known for her essay collection The Boys of My Youth, frequently cited as groundbreaking amongst literary personal essays. After a... Continue Reading →
Week 4: (Nov. 18 to 22) –Nonfiction Favorites (Leann @ ThereThereReadThis): We’ve talked about how you pick nonfiction books in previous years, but this week I’m excited to talk about what makes a book you’ve read one of your favorites. Is the topic pretty much all that matters? Are there particular ways a story can... Continue Reading →
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 →
Book review: Islands, the Universe, Home, by Gretel Ehrlich (Amazon / Book Depository)“Some days I think this one place isn’t enough. That’s when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and have the know-how and guts to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destination.... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Bread and the Knife, by Dawn Drzal (Amazon / Book Depository) Former cookbook editor Dawn Drzal's memoir is structured around 26 dishes or ingredients of significance in her life, matched up to the letters of the alphabet. Although the alphabet theme is a bit gimmicky, the writing is anything but. Drzal draws... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay (Amazon / Book Depository) It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study... Continue Reading →
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 →
Book review: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (Amazon / Book Depository) I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest ... And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my... Continue Reading →
Book review: Kitchen Yarns, by Ann Hood (Amazon / Book Depository) When I write an essay about food, I am really uncovering something deeper in my life - loss, family, confusion, growing up, growing away from what I knew, returning, grief, joy, and, yes, love. Author Ann Hood is also a Laurie Colwin devotee, and... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
