One of my resolutions for the New Year was to read more nonfiction, and I have happily gotten off to an excellent start. As far as personal development goes, this is splendid, but often not so good for writing reviews. For all the extra time it takes to get through a nonfiction book, I never know what to say about them in the end. If you are a frequent nonfiction reviewer (hi, Kim!), I would be interested to know how you conceptualize and structure your reviews. Bad Pharma is my first book for Long-Awaited Reads Month, hosted by the very…
32 CommentsTag: nonfiction
You know how sometimes when you’ve been drinking you hit that stage where you are ready for bed but you can’t actually go to bed yet, and you’re not really listening to people around you but you want to pretend you are to be polite? So you put on a really serious face to make it appear that you are listening and comprehending every word that’s being said, and periodically you nod enthusiastically? Have y’all had this? Because that was how I felt during some of the essays in The Memory Effect. I requested it on NetGalley and I was…
7 CommentsWhat now? 4th of July weekend was ages ago and I am the laziest book blogger ever for only getting around to posting about Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution at the start of August? Fair point. In my defense, I read this book all in one weekend, and if you haven’t been carting a book around on the subway for several days, it hardly even feels like a book you read at all! So I forgot about it. And that’s really not my fault. Because of the subway thing. (No, you’re the lamest excuse ever.…
17 CommentsYou know Chandler from Friends? You know how in Friends, somebody would say something stupid, and Matthew Perry would do that thing where he would fling his whole body into one large, frantic gesture of utter incredulity? That is how I felt all the way through How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Exactly like that. I kept flinging the book across the room (really satisfying, by the way! A nice thing about ARCs is you can dog ear pages and throw them across the room or even rip out pages if you want, and it doesn’t matter because they belong to you,…
31 CommentsOn Sunday, after a lovely day curled up under blankets in my pajamas eating and watching films, it occurred to me that it had been ages since I sat down and read a book cover to cover. There are few things I enjoy like I enjoy sitting down with a book and not getting up again until the book is finished. So after I caught up on teh blogz, I went into my living room and– Well, I went into my living room and watched the Packers game. With the Saints out of it, I’m supporting the Packers for the…
55 CommentsBooks about perceptions of history and historical figures have abounded in my life lately, and I love them. Forever. Heather recently reviewed a book about how the impact of the Moses story on American culture, which I am planning to read soon; I got this book about how the treatment of various events in American history has changed in history textbooks over the years; and then there was Contested Will, which dealt with the history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy. In the few months when I thought I was going to write a senior thesis in college, it was going…
24 CommentsColonial encounters fascinate me. Sometimes I think that I will abandon all my other reading and devote myself only to colonial fiction and nonfiction. In general, I like colonial encounters by colonizing country in this exact order from best to worst: British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, German, Spanish, American. I have a particular sneaky fondness for novels from the olden days where stalwart British protagonists go abroad and have stiff upper lips and unyielding codes of hono(u)r. Please don’t judge me. Three Empires on the Nile had a lot of players and a lot of new words and terms for…
20 CommentsI am a fan of delayed gratification. You may not know this about me because, for instance, I whined so much about not having Monsters of Men handed to me the identical second that I finished reading The Ask and the Answer. You may suppose that a girl who reads the end of books before she reads the middle, and interrupts cross-stitching a Christmas stocking for her little cousin to find out from Television Without Pity what is going to happen in the last twenty minutes of the episode of The Good Wife she is watching, is not a girl…
37 Comments
Review: A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin
Phew. Finally. I was reading this book for a good, ooh, three weeks I guess, before I finished it at last. Now I know a lot more things than I knew previously about the formation of the modern Middle East, but still not a lot. As with Three Empires on the Nile, much of the information contained in A Peace to End All Peace went in one eye and out the other. (That’s a gross image but “ear” doesn’t work with reading, so, er, sorry.) A Peace to End All Peace is about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and…
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