Where is your nonfiction section please.
Reading New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv's debut, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (September 13, 2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I realized I had an unintentional trend this year of reading about selfhood in some form. It started with the first book I read in the year, Will Storr's... Continue Reading →
Self-help is not my thing whatsoever. When I started this blog, it was with the intention to show how much nonfiction actually encompasses beyond areas like self-help. When telling people I only read nonfiction for years, I often got that response: that I must read a lot of self-help. Um, no. I'm perfect. But seriously,... Continue Reading →
Interestingly, three new books are out this month addressing scientific definitions of life and its hazy boundaries in some way. I've read them all. (What a contemplative time it's been, for better or worse.) Let's discuss! Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul, by... Continue Reading →
I wanted to include When Breath Becomes Air in my medical nonfiction roundup, but this memoir takes a different path and deserves its own standalone post. (After this I'll return to non-medical topics next week, I promise!) I came across a coffee-stained copy (I hope it's coffee) in my neighborhood's Little Free Library while I... Continue Reading →
Book review: Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich (Amazon / Book Depository) Books like this don't come along every day. Patient H.M. is an extraordinary true story worked into an excellent piece of narrative nonfiction. At its core is the legendary patient whose 'broken' brain helped science understand more about how non-broken brains work, to borrow a line that... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 