If you’ve been paying attention to my recent “Currently” posts, you know that one of my favorite things about fall is football season. I really only got into football in the last few years. As a kid, I used to hate sitting through Sunday afternoon Vikings games. But it’s something my family, in particular my [...]
Book Review
Parts of this post originally appeared on Book Riot. In 2002, Papa Pilgrim, a reclusive, ultra-religious family man, purchased a 420-acre mining area in the middle of an Alaskan state park. Ignoring the cautions of local park officials, Pilgrim bulldozed a 13-mile road through the park to the small town of McCarthy so that his [...]
I have been waiting a long time to read this book. Katy Butler first came to my attention when I read 2010 New York Times Magazine piece called “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” a look at medical interventions and our path to death. In the article, Butler told the story of her father’s life after a severe stroke, focusing on the way [...]
Michael Perry is one of those authors that I like and admire, but I haven’t actually read that often. He’s written six books, all on various topics of rural life, but I’ve only ever finished one — Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg. I’ve perused bits and pieces of [...]
As someone who loves books but hates thinking about money, the idea that publishing is a business is often hard for me to wrap my head around. But the fact that publishers need to make money with books like 50 Shades of Grey in order to support Great Literature is a reality of the publishing business. [...]
My sister, Jenny, and I are spending the summer revisiting the Harry Potter series, some of the most read and most anticipated books of our childhood. You can catch up with our thoughts on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (we read the British version), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, [...]
So, this book. It’s a doozy that made me think and feel a lot… not all of it positive. Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City by Choire Sicha really is nonfiction that reads like a novel, a detailed look at life in a large East [...]
Apparently, this is the week where I am posting pieces everywhere on the Internet except this blog. Earlier this month I mentioned reading Sister: An African American Life in Search of Justice by Sylvia Bell White and Jody LePage, an oral history by a woman who grew up in the segregated south then migrated to Milwaukee [...]
One of my favorite ways to find new-to-me nonfiction writers (particularly writers who do journalistic nonfiction) is to read the long stories or profiles that get featured in major newspapers and magazines. I fell in love with journalist Katy Butler’s writing because of a 2010 New York Times Magazine piece called “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” [...]
Title: Son of a Gun: A Memoir Author: Justin St. Germain Genre: Memoir Year: 2013 Publisher: Random House Acquired: From the publisher as part of a TLC Book Tour [rating:4/5] Review: In early September 2001, 20-year-old Justin St. Germain arrived home from class to find out that his mother, Debbie, had been shot and killed and [...]
