Memoirs – Biographies – Letters – Diaries
Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap
Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot. (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.) So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]
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Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: Love Letters
The final entry of my exploration of Vita Sackville-West’s life and literature, and part 2 of circling back to Virginia Woolf, here via the two writers’ personal relationship. Both writers’ letters had previously been published individually; so had their diaries — you’d think an edition collecting their correspondence with each other in one volume, […]
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Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings
An anthology giving a taste of every aspect of Sackville-West’s considerable oeuvre, from her memoirs and diaries, letters and travel writing to her literary criticism, her writing on gardening, her fiction (both longer works and short fiction), her poetry, and finally her reflection on animals (which she loved). I haven’t read the whole anthology yet […]
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Agatha Christie: Come, Tell Me How You Live
Blurb: Agatha Christie’s personal memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan, where she worked on the digs and wrote some of her most evocative novels. Think you know Agatha Christie? Think again! To the world she was Agatha Christie, legendary author of bestselling whodunits. But […]
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Adrienne Mayor: The Poison King
Blurb: A National Book Award finalist for this epic work, Adrienne Mayor delivers a gripping account of Mithradates, the ruthless visionary who began to challenge Rome’s power in 120 B.C. Machiavelli praised his military genius. Kings coveted his secret elixir against poison. Poets celebrated his victories, intrigues, and panache. But until now, no one has […]
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William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Blurb: When William Kamkwamba was just 14 years old, his family told him that he must leave school and come home to work on the farm – they could no longer afford his fees. This is his story of how he found a way to make a difference, how he brought light to his family […]
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Zora Neale Hurston: Dust Tracks on a Road
Definitely the best book I read during the first week of the new year; the New Yorker pretty much nailed it when calling the book “warm, witty, imaginative” and adding “This is a rich and winning book.” I’d (finally) read Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God last year; having now read her autobiography, I recongnize […]
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Martha Gellhorn: Travels with Myself and Another
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks Door 10 – Peace, Book: Read a book in which the ending of a conflict is a major theme. Gellhorn is a sharp observer and she has a way with words — I’d just wish she’d liked people and, for that matter, the places she […]
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April 2021 Reading Recap
First things first: The persistent bug preventing followers / readers to comment on my posts straight off the post (i.e., other than by using the WP Reader) has finally been weeded out, thanks to my hosting service’s IT team … so you can, at last, comment even if you’re not using the WP Reader. (I […]
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John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley in Search of America
John Steinbeck has been a favorite author of mine ever since my teenage years, when I discovered (in short, though not necessarily precisely in this order) East of Eden, The Pastures of Heaven, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Pearl, with Grapes of Wrath, The Harvest Gypsies, and Cannery Row following a […]
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Ngaio Marsh: The New Zealand Books, plus Grave Mistake
The first book by Ngaio Marsh that I ever read happened to be her very last one, Light Thickens, which is as much concerned with a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as it is with the murder of one of the cast members. To a mystery fan without any Shakespearean inclinations, this might have proved fatal, […]
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John Mortimer: Murderers and Other Friends
This book is the second part of Mortimer’s autobiography — or rather, his chapter-long essays on life, society, politics, the theatre and movie industry (with guest appearances by Gielgud, Olivier, Niven, Harrison, Guinness, and plenty of other luminaries), the law, justice (not the same thing at all), family, friendship, education, travel, and a whole host […]
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Joy Harjo: Crazy Brave
Poet Joy Harjo is one of today’s foremost Native American voices; her recently-published memoir was thus a proximate choice for the corresponding entry in my quest to broaden my literary horizons. Harjo’s life story is that of many Native Americans of her generation: as far removed from the American Dream as you can be; socially […]
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February and March 2021: Reading Recap
Well, go figure. The first quarter of 2021 is already behind us, never mind that I’m still having to remind myself on occasion to write “2021” instead of “2020” … (and we’re even a week into April already, but let that go). Anyway, since I never got around to doing a “February in review” post, […]
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Zahra Hankir & Various Authors: Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World
One of the last books I read in the first quarter of 2021 was, at the same time, also one of my reading highlights to date — and next to the likes of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison (as well as Agatha Christie’s multiple appearances in the area of mysteries), […]
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Patrick Radden Keefe: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
This was a buddy read with some of my BookLikes exile friends — the inside story of the Northern Ireland conflict, the “Troubles”, from (chiefly) the 1960s up to the Good Friday Agreement and (partways) beyond, inspired and based in part on taped interviews with some of the conflict’s key players recorded in the context […]
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Patrick Leigh Fermor: The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos
The third and final part of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s narrative of his three-year trek on foot, begun more or less spontaneously at the tender age of eighteen, from the Hoek of Holland to Constantinople. Unlike the first two parts (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water), which cover his wanderings in […]
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Shaun Bythell: Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops
Shaun Bythell: Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops This was actually a holdover from February — I had already started the book once but stopped reading after chapter 1, teetering on the verge of a DNF, before ultimately deciding “just finish it; it’s short, what the heck” one Sunday morning in early March […]
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Barack Obama: A Promised Land
Probably the most-anticipated publication of the final weeks of 2020, and for once I not only rushed to read it but am also inclined to agree with the hype (at least, for the most part). This is the voice of the President Obama that we’ve come to know while he was in office, perhaps tempered […]
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Kamala Harris: The Truths We Hold
Harris wrote this book while still serving as a U.S. Senator; still, it also conveys quite a good picture of what kind of Vice President she will be — because it leaves little doubt about the kind of person that she is, and the things that motivate and drive her. The Truths We Hold: those […]
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