Where is your nonfiction section please.
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 →
Book review: Not a Novel, by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals If the language that you can speak isn't enough, that's a very good reason to start writing. As paradoxical as it may be: The impossibility of expressing what happens to us in words is what pushes us towards writing. Whenever I haven't been... Continue Reading →
Rough Beauty, by Karen Auvinen (Amazon / Book Depository) March was thick with anticipation—the pendulum between winter and spring, between dormancy and growth—the month of hope, the month of change. Its arrival meant winter was certain to end. By then, I’d had nearly four and a half months of cold and isolation. And although I... Continue Reading →
Book review: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (Amazon / Book Depository) There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties,... Continue Reading →
Book review: Furious Hours, by Casey Cep (Amazon / Book Depository) Seventeen years had passed since she'd published To Kill a Mockingbird and twelve since she'd finished helping her friend Truman Capote report the crime story in Kansas that became In Cold Blood. Now, finally, she was ready to try again. Novelist Harper Lee, long beloved... 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: Survival Math, by Mitchell S. Jackson (Amazon / Book Depository) Sirens scream (for who else in the world but you?) in the distance. In a prose style unlike any I've encountered before, Mitchell S. Jackson, novelist and writing instructor at New York and Columbia Universities, writes a memoir of his life and tumultuous... 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: Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer (Amazon / Book Depository) Never thought you were the type to stay up late reading a grammar and style guide, dissolving in laughter every few pages? I thought I wasn't either. Allow this book to prove you wrong like it... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Traveling Feast, by Rick Bass (Amazon / Book Depository) I decided to take a break from writing and go on an extended pilgrimage. I set out traveling the country (and in one case Europe) to visit writers who were mostly a generation older than I am, the ones who helped me become... Continue Reading →
Book review: Blue Nights, by Joan Didion (Amazon / Book Depository) ...there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue...suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise... you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over... Continue Reading →
Book review: West Winging It, by Pat Cunnane (Amazon / Book Depository) This year and last have seen a wave of newly published memoirs from former Obama staffers. I read speechwriter David Litt's wonderful, charming Thanks, Obama last year, so after that I was on board with the genre. West Winging It begins with a similar premise - young... Continue Reading →
