Where is your nonfiction section please.
Mother-daughter stories aren't always my thing, but I somehow ended up reading three (!) recent memoirs (momoirs?) about just that. One of them you've certainly already heard of: It seems like every year there's one memoir that blows up and is absolutely everywhere (think Educated) and last year it was Michelle Zauner's Crying in H... Continue Reading →
It's the most wonderful time of the year: Christmas stresses are over and it's time for year-end favorites lists! I love dividing up my year's favorite books by new releases and backlist selections because it means I can include more books. Also, since my blogging has deteriorated into a truly awful state, I realized that... Continue Reading →
Because my blogging has reached new productivity lows, I'm trying to at least gather some thoughts on the past year's reading. Trying! As I mentioned, I continued to read most heavily this year in the area of pop science and psychology. It's time to accept that I'll never get around to full reviews for these.... Continue Reading →
The Sisterhood of the Enchanted Forest: Sustenance, Wisdom, and Awakening in Finland's Karelia by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle (buy it used or new at SecondSale.com) Naomi Moriyama, a Tokyo-born Manhattanite, was uprooted from her noisy but familiar New York City existence when her husband got a Fulbright to the University of Eastern Finland in... Continue Reading →
Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From, by Kamal Al-Solaylee (HarperCollins, September 7, 2021)Buy it used or new at SecondSale.com Immigrants, no matter our origins and skin tones, share a common delusion: we think we take pieces of our homelands with us and leave parts of ourselves behind whenever we choose or... Continue Reading →
One of my most anticipated this year was Slonim Woods 9, a memoir by Daniel Barban Levin, a former Sarah Lawrence student who was in a notorious cult run out of their college dorm by the father of one of his roommates. That's a lot to take in right there, but my god does it... Continue Reading →
Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions, by Michael Moss Food resonates so large in our memory because food looms so large in our lives. The act of eating touches everything we experience, everywhere we go, everyone we know, and everything we feel. As much as we are what we... Continue Reading →
The Confidence Game, by Maria Konnikova (Viking, 2016) Psychologist Konnikova takes a pop psych look at a subject so many of us find magnetically fascinating - con artists and why their manipulations work. She breaks down some of the psychology behind cons and the beliefs and tendencies in the average person that these play to,... Continue Reading →
The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story, by Kate Summerscale Some events are so dark that to find them is an act of imagination as much as memory. In 1938, as a storm gathered on the continent and Europe braced for something coming, yet unknown but surely terrible, in England a 34-year-old housewife... 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 →
My reading lately has been heavily gearing towards pop science and medical and social science topics. These two deal with very specific breeds of evil: mediocre white men who think they deserve the world at the expense of people of color and women, and the middle school experience. Both are atrocious in their own special... Continue Reading →
As we know, 2020 has been the living worst. A helpful balm for the seemingly endless parade of horrors this year has thrown at us is reading some facts about how the state of the world and humanity in general aren't as horrible as they might seem or feel. Let's investigate. First is Factfulness: Ten... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 