I’ve arranged the following mini-reviews of the 42 books I finished this year by topic rather than in the order that I read – or, in three cases, re-read – them. I hope you’ll find a few titles that sound intriguing for your own reading. I also recommend subscribing to the two print magazines I’ve subscribed to (and have thoroughly enjoyed) for several decades now: The New Yorker (a weekly) and The Sun (a monthly).

Fiction

Beartown (2016) by Fredrik Backman. Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith.

My book club’s selection for November (we’d read one of Backman’s earlier books, A Man Called Ove, and loved it, so we agreed to read another of his novels). And I am so glad we did! At first I thought it would be difficult for me to get excited about, as the plot centers around a small town’s obsession with its amateur ice hockey team. What it turned into was a story about a host of characters who I came to care a lot about. Backman’s ability to gradually and credibly reveal the conflicted motives, suppressed fears, and the blind-spots of his characters – the teenagers as well as their parents and mentors – is, I think, unmatched by any other modern author I’ve ever read. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone, and believe it to be superior to the also-excellent Ove. I will be thinking about the inherited and self-made dilemmas of these characters for a long time. And I won’t hesitate to read any other novel produced by this gifted, skilled Swedish writer.

Winter (2017) by Ali Smith

I love it when I find a book with writing so good that I resolve to track down all the other books written by its author. A book-loving friend of mind mentioned Ali Smith’s “seasonal tetralogy” a few years ago, and I did buy a paperback copy of one of them (Autumn), but I never got around to starting it, and now I can’t find the dang thing. But after reading Winter for my book club, I’ll need to find another copy and plunge into that one (the first of the tetralogy that she published, not that they need to be read in any particular sequence). With Winter, the attraction was not its plot, but the way she tells the story, and all the wordplay and allusiveness (to poetry, to political events), the wittiness, the attention to detail (especially linguistic detail), and the unexpectedness of her sentences. I doubt that I read any three pages of this book without being surprised by something she did with words. Loved this book – no wonder so many of her (many) novels and short stories have been nominated for literary prizes.

Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley

Randy chose this classic for our book club to read. I thought I’d read it in college, but I didn’t recognize a single scene or character from this book – just the concept of soma that Huxley refers to – so I may never have read this book before after all. The main thing that impressed me about Brave New World was how long ago this book was published – before World War II (!), and long before most other well-known dystopian novels (like Orwell’s Animal Farm) were published. What I didn’t like so much was the story itself and Huxley’s rather unremarkable writing style. Too many contrived coincidences, unlikable main characters, too much detail in describing the social setup of the author’s futuristic universe. Huxley is one of my favorite nonfiction writers, so I was surprised that I found this particular novel of his so uninteresting. (I do remember liking his final novel, 1962’s Island, at least when I read it back in the 1970s or 1980s.) The good news is that as soon as I finished Brave New World, I returned to reading more of Huxley’s Collected Essays and remain amazed at the intelligence, clarity, and provocativeness of his nonfiction.

The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O’Brien

O’Brien’s later novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds, has been on my list of Novels Cal Wants to Read for many years. I read this one instead because my book group prefers shorter novels to long ones. This one was not published until after O’Brien’s death in 1966. It is one of the oddest novels I’ve ever read. I enjoyed it not for the story, but for O’Brien’s astonishing writing style. You could open this book anywhere and pick a random paragraph, and I can almost guarantee you’d be amazed at O’Brien’s (well, his narrator’s) word choices. I won’t mention the central conceit of the book, as it might spoil the experience for anyone deciding to read it, but I can confidently claim that you won’t forget O’Brien’s writing – even if its rich, outlandish, unpredictable, often footnoted descriptions might deter you from attempting to read another of O’Brien’s novels anytime soon. I’m glad the edition I borrowed from the library included the enlightening introduction by an O’Brien scholar – but I’d advise against reading it until you finish the novel itself (too many spoilers). If you love the mesmerizing, poetic power of words (in this case, English, even though O’Brien’s native tongue was Irish), you will enjoy this book.

Table for Two: Fictions (2024) by Amor Towles

I didn’t read this entire collection of Towles’ short stories: instead, I read, for the book club Randy and I are members of, the novella that closes the book, entitled Eve in Hollywood. It centers around the exploits of a character from one of Towles’ previous books, The Rules of Civility. Set in late 1930s Hollywood, the narrative voice switches between the omnicient author’s and the points of view of various characters that Eve, its central character, meets shortly after arriving in Beverly Hills. The novella’s plot, and the speeches delivered by its characters, is rather cheesy at times, but the almost cliche-ridden story is repeatedly redeemed by the unexpected psychological and sociological asides that take the form of Towles’ characters’ thoughts. (Some of the insights of his characters seem a bit implausible, given their back stories, but they are so articulately written that the reader glosses over the implausibility.) There are also several plot twists. All in all, very entertaining, and, as with Towles’ novels, this tale would make a great movie!

The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Pip Williams

An engaging story that revolves around the role of the few (and mostly unacknowledged) female researchers whose labors helped produce the Oxford English Dictionary. The main characters are the author’s fictional creations (the protagonist is the daughter of a male researches, also fictional), but numerous actual people, including the dictionary’s editor, John Murray, and his family, are also featured. The novel vividly shows (though without a preachy tone and with considerable psychological depth) how the patriarchal and class attitudes of pre-World War I England’s upper-clase males perpetuated the notion of females as intellectually inferior to males; the novel’s plot centers around the main character’s attempts to protest (or subvert) those patterns. The writing is good (and subtle) enough to have kept me interested in the fate of its characters, and the background facts and details of how the twelve volumes of the great dictionary was painstakingly assembled between 1879 and 1928 are fascinating: the novel seemed a delightful (if fictional) supplement to Simon Winchester’s nonfiction account (The Professor and the Madman, which I enjoyed reading several years ago.)

Landscape with Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves (1980) by Barry Gifford

A friend gave me this book because he enjoyed it so much; otherwise, I’d probably never have read it. But I’m glad I did read it, as it’s quite unusual: a novel unfolding in diary-like entries (but not strictly chronological order) that was based on an actual (mostly long-distance) decades-long friendship between two writers: one of them gay, the other straight. Part of what was unusual about this novel when it was first published in 1980 (I read a 2013 reprint) was the sexual frankness of its first-person narrator. What’s unusual about it for me was Gifford’s (the straight man’s) skill in such a sustained and persuasive “ventriloquizing” of the thoughts and feelings of his gay friend (including the gay friend’s thoughts and feelings about the novelist). What kept me reading was the narrator’s recollections of his journey from small-town life to his eventual move to New York City via a stint in the U.S. Navy with subsequent sojourns in, among other places, Paris and Greece. All of these memories were completely believable; what will stick with me is Gifford’s success in so skillfully creating such a readable novel (Gifford’s first) out of his own recollections of an actual friendship.

Southernmost (2018) by Silas House

I seldom complete a book within a day or two of starting it, but I did finish this one (which Randy’s and my book club selected) quickly. I’m very glad I didn’t read the plot summary on the book’s flap, as it made reading the book almost pointless. (Regrettably, I glanced at the subject headings in the book’s cataloging note before I’d read very much of the novel, and one of these subject headings ruined for me what would otherwise have been an unexpected plot twist. I won’t make that mistake again, at least with other novels I choose to read.) Although I have no complaints about the plausibility of the book’s plot (which held my interest) or the author’s straightforward writing style, I don’t think I’ll remember the book’s characters or the story for very long. This is not to say there’s anything wrong with this book, but I think I’d rather spend my limited book-reading time (especially for novels) with more challenging material.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) by Tom Robbins

Although I’d heard of Tom Robbins, I’d not read any of his popular-in-their-day novels until this one was suggested for the book club Randy and I are part of. It was certainly worth reading, even though I found it rather exhausting at times. Robbins crammed so much detail into his story, and so many stories into his main story, that I could only read it in short intervals. My favorite parts of the book were the philosophical musings put into the voices of several of the main characters – lengthy riffs about (among many, many other things) the nature of reality, politics, religion, nature, self-delusion, and the irrationality of human beings. I will remember this book, and the amazing pyrotechnics of its author’s style and imagination. Many readers would find the book “dated,” but I found Robbins’ themes to be precisely ones that still preoccupy me, despite the fact that the setting of the book (the 1970s) is so far now in the past.

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth: Stories (2020) by Daniel Mason

Excellent writing, interesting stories (most, if not all, based on historical events or at least historical persons). Each story is told in the argot of the time the story takes place, so the language for all of the stories is necessarily stilted. Sometimes that made the stories fascinating to read, sometimes not so much. The ability of the author to inhabit the imagined mind of the narrators was impressive, but the stories seemed to end rather arbitrarily – almost as if the story was a performance of a certain writing style instead of something the author cared about. I do not think I will remember these tales, or want to read any more of this author’s books. If I do, it would be one of his novels, rather than more of his short stories.

Biography / Memoirs

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (2005) by Stanley Kunitz

My friends Katharine and Dowman gave me this book as a Winter Solstice gift, probably because they know I like both gardening and reading about gardening. I discovered that I had read it back in 2007, but didn’t remember squat about it, so re-reading it was like reading it for the first time – and with no library due date to worry about this go-around! Kunitz’s final garden was the one he created in Provincetown, so that alone made it interesting from a gardener’s point of view, Provincetown’s weather, flora, and fauna being so different than Atlanta’s. Roughly speaking, the first half of the book focuses on Kunitz’s reflections on gardening, with the final half centering on the nature of poetry (and creativity in general). Still, throughout the book, Kunitz repeatedly draws parallels between these two preoccupations (or, for him, careers). It is a wonderful book that any gardener – or any poet – would enjoy, and I’ve added my now twice-read, twice-enjoyed copy to the small selection of gardening books I keep out on my sun porch to dip into when I want to read (or re-read) something about the spiritual/psychological side of gardening (vs., say, how-to manuals).

The Bee Cottage Story: How I Made a Muddle of Things and Decorated My Way Back to Happiness (2015) by Frances Schultz

I don’t usually post comments on the numerous home decor (or garden how-to) books I read, but this one was so well-written, entertaining, and unusual, I’m making an exception. It’s unusual because, although it’s filled with before-and-after photos and dozens of down-to-earth decorating tips, it’s also a delightful, often hilarious memoir of how a middle-aged person used her talent for, and love of, creating domestic bliss as a remedy to – or, rather, a pathway out of – a romantic breakup and a sequel to a busy life as an author, tv show host, and acclaimed cook. The book had its beginnings as a blog, and that’s reflected in the informal, self-deprecating, self-revealing, and decidedly humorous tone of Schultz’s writing style. Her story is an interesting one, well-told, and certainly well-illustrated (both by photos and Schultz’s own watercolors). I read this book in a single day, and immediately sat down to have the Internet fill me in on what’s happened in Schultz’s life in the ten years since she published this lovely, completely charming and completely disarming memoir. I learned, among other things, that Schultz has since sold Bee Cottage (located in the East Hamptons), has divorced her second husband (who figures in this book), and has recently bought a Georgia house in the Cotswolds. The praise this book received far and wide probably means there’s another in the making as she figures out how to settle into her latest abode. As Schultz and I share a similar mania for the sheer idea of living in the Cotswolds (which I’ve visited twice and would visit again in a heartbeat), I can confidently and excitedly look forward to her next memoir! Unlike most home decor books (which I get from the public library), I bought a copy of this one and will be adding it to my ever-growing collection of such books (one of only three book collections comprised of many dozens of titles instead of merely a few).

A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present (2023) by Murray Browne

The author of this memoir – a fellow biblioblogger who, like me, lives in Atlanta, gave me a copy of this book at a library book sale he was volunteering to help with. Though short (only 55 pages), it is excellently, engagingly written. Browne came into possession of two caches of his father’s letters, but did not re-examine them for thirty years, long after his father had died (and after Browne became older than his father had been when he died). What I especially enjoyed: Browne’s subtle but consistent interweaving in his account of what he learned from those letters with his reflections on how they contributed to his own recollections of his upbringing, the arc of his own career(s), and the influence of his father on his own personality and some of his longstanding habits and attitudes. The story of Browne’s father’s service in World War II is interesting, but it’s how much about himself that Browne gleans from his father’s letters (and his memories of his upbringing) that are the most impressive, most moving feature of this memoir. I also appreciated Browne’s thoughtful asides on the unreliable nature of memory, the unique, (and increasingly rare) resource that preserved personal (mailed) letters are (even when – and perhaps especially when -they are revisited decades after they are written), and Browne’s reflections on mortality that any re-reading of anyone’s letters inevitably creates, at least when the re-reader is as sensitive and as good a writer as Browne happens to be.

The Road Home: A Memoir (1997) by Eliza Thomas

Memoirs about anyone moving from the city (in this case, Boston) to the wilds of nature (in this case, Vermont) are catnip to me, so I snatched up a copy of this one at a recent library book sale. (A blurb from Anne Lamott – “I loved Eliza Thomas’ book from page one” – was especially intriguing.) Thomas’ memoir differs from most back-to-the-land accounts in the order she tells it in: it’s not a straightforward chronological arrangement, but instead skips back and forth between time periods (both before, during, and after the purchase and modifications of her woodland cabin). Another thing that distinguishes this book from similar ones is the completely humble, self-deprecating tone of it: our storyteller is full of doubts, ambivalences, naivete, and fears that she describes along with accounts of her (and her boyfriend’s) challenges and accomplishments – and failures. Woven into the story of the cabin-settling-into is the story of a forty-something-year-old unmarried woman adopting an infant from China. I won’t be keeping this book to read again one day, but, like Lamott, I also enjoyed reading it from its first page.

Oscar Wilde (1973) by Martin Fido

A friend of mine who knew I collect books about Wilde gave me this book from her own home library. I thought I’d read everything there was to know about Wilde, but this book proved me wrong. Its author (a British professor who died in 2019) published biographies of several British literary luminaries; his take on Wilde’s rise and fall is more balanced than most of the others I’ve read. His praises of Oscar’s talents are tempered with Fido’s criticism of Oscar’s faults (especially his hubris). Based largely on Wilde’s letters (which I purchased a few weeks ago), Fido is especially interesting when he’s describing the other luminaries of the day who played a role in Wilde’s career. I also learned a lot of interesting information about Wilde’s father: most biographers dwell on the personality and accomplishments (such as they were) of Wilde’s mother. The large-format book’s illustrations are excellent, and (another surprise) most of them I’d not seen before. I’m glad to have this book, and it would be an excellent choice for anyone unfamiliar with the astonishing life and work (and legend) of Oscar Wilde.

Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (1993) by May Sarton

This is the fourth of Sarton’s journals that I’ve read, and I enjoyed it just as much as I did the others. I stumbled across my copy of this one at a Goodwill store, and was thrilled at such an unexpected find (and a pristine hardback to boot!). Sarton mentions in one of her entries that some readers find Sarton’s journals un-put-downable, and that’s certainly true for me: writers’ journals (and their collections of letters) are one of my favorite types of reading. Part of my fascination with Sarton springs from the fact that she was a pioneering lesbian writer who personally knew many other writers I admire (for example, Doris Grumbach, who also published New England-based memoirs, one of which I’ve also read). Also, Sarton’s memoirs (like Grumbach’s) focus on what it’s like to be elderly. Sarton died in 1995, and this was her final memoir, but there are a few previous ones that I haven’t yet read. I look forward to eventually doing that, to tracking down a copy of her postumously-published Selected Letters, and to visiting (for a second time) (the site of her now-demolished home in York, Maine when Randy and I travel to New England later this year.

Bibliophobia: A Memoir (2025) by Sarah Chihaya

I spotted this book on the “new books” shelf at one of my local public libraries and immediately knew, just from its title, that I’d want to read it. It’s a wrenching account of a person’s periodic escapes into (actually, obsessions with) certain books as a way of coping with several sequential bouts of her clinical depression. An account of depression as articulate as this one is makes for difficult, painful reading, and I almost abandoned this book before finishing it, but I’m glad I soldiered on until the end. What kept me reading was the exquisite level of detail in the writer’s recollections of what depression feels like, and the sorts of feelings and behaviors that low self-esteem can spiral into, even for someone as accomplished and talented and articulate (and often mordantly humorous) as this author is. Her comments on the many particular books that influenced her so powerfully (and sometimes so destructively) were also fascinating, and often surprising.

Gratitude (2015) by Oliver Sacks

This book is a collection of four essays Sacks published in the New York Times shortly before his death from cancer in 2015, at age 82. The essays are beautifully written, and it took me less than an hour to read. I read it because I’d seen it cited so often, becuase I knew Sacks was a gay man with an intriguing life story, because I had admired his essays in the New Yorker, because Randy and I are members of two groups who have been recently discussing gratitude, and because I was wondering if this book might be a candidate for the book club Randy and I are part of. Although I enjoyed reading these essays, I wouldn’t quite label it “mandatory reading” for anyone other than someone determined to read everything Sacks published during his lifetime (thirteen books, some of them bestsellers).

Art & Design

Art Held Hostage: The Battle Over the Barnes Collection (2003) by John Anderson

This was one of the most riveting books of journalism that I’ve read in years. It helps that before reading it I’d visited the Barnes Foundation twice – once (in the mid-1980s) at its original incarnation (in a purpose-built mansion next to Barnes’ home in a suburb of Philadelphia) and again (this past spring) to its new building in the middle of Philadelphia. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) was (among other things), a brilliant, eccentric, litigious millionaire, and this astonishing story of how the courts and the local Powers That Be managed to thwart tbe unusual (and unusually specifric) terms of Barnes’ will governing, after his sudden death, the incalculably valuable collection of Impressionist and African art reads like a detective novel. Plenty of suspense, back-room maneuvering, and a large cast of interesting real-life characters, some of whom are still living. My (library) copy includes an epilogue that the author published ten years after his book first appeared. I read the thing in a matter of days, and you will too, if you’re an art-loving reader of excellent prose.

“The Beauty of Life”: William Morris & the Art of Design (2003) edited by Diane Waggoner

Written to coincide with a 2003 exhibition at California’s the Huntington Library, the book consists of essays – each of them gloriously illustrated – written by four supurbly qualified (and talented) writers who separately address different features of Morris’ wide-ranging commercial career: his activities in textiles, stained glass, interior design, and book design (The only topics not covered are Morris’ literary and political activities, although they are certainly and repeatedly acknowledged.) The book also includes an essay on Morris’s crucial influence on the American Arts & Crafts Movement, and another on what happened to Morris’s design firm after Morris died. All of this is prefaced with equally well-illustrated overviews of Morris’ life and the history of the design companies he created. This is an excellently-written, gratifyingly detailed, and sumptuously illustrated coffee table-sized book that I am happy to add to my growing collection of books written by Morris or about his remarkable life and career. And who knew that the Huntington owns one of the world’s largest collections of Morrisiana?

William Morris by Himself: Designs and Writings (2004) edited by Gillian Naylor

Soon after becoming smitten (in my 40s? 50s? 60s?) with William Morris’ wallpaper designs, and after my pilgrimage to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to see the room there he designed, I started collecting books about Morris wherever I could find them at library book sales (or other places where I could buy them at discount prices). Morris was such a fountainhead of art, design, handicrafts, literature, and progressive social and political ideas, I knew I’d need to read more than a single book to learn as much as I wanted to know about his life and work. This is the first of those books assembled for my home library that I’ve gotten around to reading. (The others are: William Morris (1989), William Morris at Home: An Intimate View of His Life and Homes, Including Personal Recipes (1996), The Flowers of William Morris (1996), The Gardens of William Morris (1999), and William Morris: Artist, Craftsman, Pioneer (2010).) An Arts and Crafts Movement expert, the book’s editor prefaces her chronologically arranged selections of excerpts from Morris’ books, letters, and lectures – plus full-color samples of his stained glass, tapestries, wallpapers, and printing – with an excellent and insightful 13-page introduction. Reading Morris’ own writing has certainly renewed my interest in this Renaissance man, and doubles my determination to buy a few more Morris-designed textiles (or maybe a shower curtain based on one of his designs) for my house.

Gardening

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2023) by Camille T. Dungy

This book was a revelation in several senses. It’s only the second gardening-themed book written by a non-white female (the first was a book by Jamaica Kincaid that I also loved) that I’ve read in all my many decades of reading gardening books: a revealing (and embarrassing) statement in itself. Soil is not only an account of one person’s gardening odyssey (one of my favorite types of books to read), but for me it is an informative description of gardening in a bioregion unfamiliar to me (Colorado). More memorably, Soil is also an education on how white racism (and white male privilege) is still an everyday reality for Black people in the United States. The way Dungy weaves political and historical facts into her memories of gardening, motherhood, and her teaching and writing career – plus the psychological and sociological ramifications of the fact that Dungy is the child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of even more severely oppressed U.S. ancestors (and fellow gardeners) – is a remarkable accomplishment. Ditto Dungy’s valid reservations about (when she’s not downright annoyed with) several famous U.S. “nature authors” I’ve always (and, until now, uncritically) revered, such as Edward Abby, John Muir, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver. The book is so rich in gardening history (and nomenclature) that I am unfamiliar with; I would undeniably benefit from reading Soil again, now that I’ve gotten past the astonishment of reading it through a first time.

The Gardener’s Life: Inspired Plantsmen, Passionate Collectors, and Singular Visions in the World of Gardening (2004) by Laurence Sheehan and photographs by William Stites

Although I snagged a bargain-priced copy of this expensive book years ago, I had somehow never gotten around to reading it. I am so happy that I rediscovered it again recently, sitting on a bookshelf on my sunporch (where I store my dozens of non-how-to gardening books). Most coffeetable-sized books like this one are merely showcases for their photographs, but The Gardener’s Life is an exception. Excellent writing, Sheehan’s; I was dismayed to learn that Sheehan had died (at age 82) and won’t be writing any more books. Fortunately, I’ve been able to track down a library copy of his book on birding and birders that I expect to enjoy as much as I enjoyed his interviews with these U.S. gardeners and garden product shop owners collected in this sumptuous and informative book. I’ll also be putting several of the gardens featured in the book into my travel plans for future U.S. road trips.

A Journal in Thyme (1994) by Eric Grissell

Garden journals are among my favorite reading matter, especially when the writer’s garden shares the same climate as my own. Grisell lives in Washington, DC, so the plants and the gardening challenges (and frustrations, major and minor) that he discusses are gratifyingly familiar. Although Grissell’s book is not so memorable that I’ll keep my copy to re-read one day (as I have done with every book of another D.C.-based garden writer, Henry Mitchell) I did enjoy Grissell’s Mitchell-like conversational, self-deprecating style and wry humor. I copied into the “Gardens and Gardening” section of my Commonplace book a dozen or so passages from this book, and look forward to at some point looking into his other books: its predecessor, Thyme on My Hands (1987), and his most recent, A History of Zinnias (2020).

A Gardener at the End of the World: How to Grow Hope in a World on Fire – A Year of Seeds, Pandemics, and the Quiet Power of Growing Something True (2024) by Margot Anne Kelley

I love to read any gardener’s journal, but this one is unusual: it beautifully braids together gardening lore, plant histories, and a month-by-month account of gardening during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author lives on a scarcely populated peninsula in Maine, but most of the plant histories she provides are for vegetables and herbs that are also grown where I live. Kelly’s musings on the parallels between the spread of plants and the spread of viruses, and her emphasis on the interconnectedness of all life (human and non-) is gracefully and provocatively done. Highly recommended, this surprisingly rich and informative “memoir.” Kelly also includes vivid reminders of what it felt like to Americans to find themselves adapting (not very gracefully sometimes) to a deadly pandemic: I’d forgotten so many of the details of that, and the fact that, for many of us, our gardens remained a source of solace and groundedness during a difficult time socially (and politically).

The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (2020) by Sue Stuart-Smith

From the book’s blurb: “Using case studies of people struggling with stress, depression, trauma, and addiction, . . . Stuart-Smith explores the many ways in which gardening can help transform people’s lives.” Although most of these stories and anecdotes were interesting, somehow this isn’t the book I’d hoped it would be when I saw its title. I thought/hoped it would be a series of meditations on the therapeutic benefits of the general amateur gardener, rather than about the scientific (including brain chemistry-related) results of experiments in therapeutic horticulture with various groups (mostly in the UK). My favorite passages had to do with Stuart-Smith’s exploration of our species’ indisputable but mysterious fascination with flowers, the role that gardening played in Sigmund Freud’s life, and the author’s comments throughout her book on how gardening can graduallly change the gardener’s experience of (and notions about ) the passage of time, serving as a corrective to the ingrained habit most of us have of regarding time as linear (vs. cyclical, sequential vs. seasonal, uniform vs. punctuated by episodes of what others have designated as “flow”). Although I learned many things from reading this well-written book, I won’t be adding it to my small collection of cherished gardening memoirs that I enjoy dipping into again from time to time.

Essay Collections

Feel Free: Essays (2018) by Zadie Smith

I’d remembered enjoying some of novelist Zadie Smith’s essays in the New Yorker, so when I saw at my local library this collection of thirty-one essays published in various magazines between 2010 and 2017, I brought it home with high expectations. Those expectations were not only met, but wildly exceeded. No matter what she writes about, Smith is full of surprises – not only in her viewpoints, but in her turns of phrase. And every essay is shot through with curiosity, humility, and humor. After enjoying these essays (even the one on Justin Bieber!), I’ve added her previously-published essay collection (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, 2009) to my list of Nonfiction Books Cal Wants to Read.

Everything is Personal: Notes on Now (2020) by Laurie Stone

For the first time ever, I’m going to use excerpts from some of the blurbs for this book stand in for my own mini-review. The blurbs are spot-on, and I wouldn’t be able to describe this remarkable book of essays any better. To wit: “I can’t remember when I last read anything as alive, alert, self-questioning and independent-minded.” “[Stone’s] powerful sentences smile at their own precision, they don’t just make a social point but offer a model on how to think. . . . As she says, ‘About the matter of redemption, as far as I am concerned, human beings don’t fall and therefore do not need to be redeemed. We are not on a path, period.’” “To read [this book} is to experience a present tense intimacy with a lusty, testy, ebullient, scintillating mind.” And Stone’s comments on the first Trump administration (which is when some of the essays were written) are just as cogent, and relevant, to the second one we are now trying to figure out how to survive.

Essays After Eighty (2014) by Donald Hall

I don’t remember how I first heard about this book, but I am so glad one of my local public libraries had a copy for me to borrow. I wanted to read this book not because I’m familiar with his widely acclaimed poetry, but because, for several decades now, I’ve been drawn to memoirs or essays written by people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Whether or not Hall was a remarkable poet (he died in 2018), he’s certainly an excellent (and often humorous) writer of prose. I will definitely be tracking down and reading the subsequent memoir that was published after Hall’s death in 2018.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007) by Clive James

This was the best nonfiction book I read in 2024, and perhaps ever. It was so full of memorable, quotable passages that I resolved to re-read it again this year, marking as I did so the three dozen-plus paragraphs that I wanted to add to my commonplace book. I am now in the process of obtaining (either via library loan, interlibrary loan, or outright purchase) of all of James’ essay collections. There are at least a half-dozen I haven’t yet read; alas, James died in 2019, so I won’t be able to read any future essays by him. So far, this is the James book I would buy more copies of to give as gifts to certain friends, or urge them to listen to the audiobook version of. The writing is consistently excellent, and the history lessons learned are life-changing (at least they were for me), and the scope of the subjects discussed is the widest I’ve ever seen in a book of essays since the one Montaigne published in the 1500s!

Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language (2014) by Clive James

Having resolved to obtain and read every one of my favorite modern essayist’s nonfiction books, I was dismayed to learn that this is the only one owned by my local public library systems. Because I don’t read much poetry myself, I imagined this would be the collection of James’ writings that I’d be the least interested in, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Which taught me what I already knew: it doesn’t matter what James is writing about, it’s going to be exciting reading. If what James had to say about why poetry matters was this interesting, I’m guaranteed to love his other collections! I wish every living poet who wants to improve his/her craft would read this book. From reading it myself, I now have a better understanding of why (good) poetry is so appealing.

History

I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers: A Cultural History (2002) by Thomas Hine

I don’t remember where or when I got hold of a copy of this book. Was it at a library book sale? One of those Free Little Libraries? Did I spot it at an antiques mall, or at one of my periodic scans of the discounted items at Half-Price Books? However and whenever I came into possession of my copy, among all the random finds in my long reading life, it is the book I would most unhesitatingly press upon my friends to read. Shopping is such a universal human activity, and has so many economic, sociological, and psychological dimensions – and the book is so well-written – that I can’t imagine there’s a reader anywhere, of any age, who wouldn’t enjoy it, and profit by its insights. Hine’s informal, but research-based style is easy to digest but wide-ranging and full of aphoristic and slyly humorous passages. Every human activity has a history, and the history of shopping is no exception. I learned a lot from this entertaining, enlightening, provocative book; its range is so wide that re-reading it again sometime would be a pleasure. And his final chapter, where he describes the sources he used, is a goldmine of other books on this subject (I’ve already added three of them to my List of Nonfiction Books Cal Wants to Read.)

The Secret Life of Numbers: A Hidden History of Math’s Unsung Trailblazers (2023) by Kte Kitagawa and Timothy Revell

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the history of knowledge and culture – and subcultures – and in particular the history of mathematics, astronomy, and religion. I don’t understand why these subjects continue to fascinate me, but when i saw this new history of mathematics on the New Books shelf at one of my local public libraries, I couldn’t resist borrowing it. I am so glad I did so. For so brief a book (a mere 262 pages of text and illustrations), and for a book collaboratively written (meaning it must meld the styles and priorities of two rather than one author), it is an excellent, engaging, and inspiring read. Its revelations certainly revolutionized my understanding of the history of mathematics (and, to a slightly lesser degree, of astronomy) by focusing its attention on highlighting the non-Western, non-male histories of these subjects. The authors (one a mathematician, the other a science journalist) inject just enough humor into their account to make following the actual math worth the effort for a non-math person such as me. The book’s attempt to debunk the myth that the most important advances in mathematics (and astronomy) were made exclusively by European males is thoroughly successful, and rather breathtaking, and the biographical information on the non-European, non-male mathematicians chronicled in the book are fascinating in their own right. Highly recommended – and mostly comprehensible to the nonspecialist reader (thank goodness). The older I get, the less time there seems to be for reading more books about some of my “minor” reading interests, but I’m very glad I chose to make an exception to passing over yet another history of the subjects addressed by this book. Highly recommended.

Philosophy & Psychology

The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) by Alain de Botton

I first read this book in 2001, a library copy. When I saw it at an estate sale recently, I snatched it up for 50 cents, as I’d decided after reading six additional books he’s written that I want to own a copy of all of de Botton’s books. My re-reading of it was as delightful as the first time around – although I was alarmed at how little of it I remembered. (This has happened with every one of the few books I’ve read more than once: very alarming.) De Botton examines the teachings of six philosophers that he believes speak to specific problems typically besetting reflective contemporary humans. The philosophers surveyed are Sophocles, (and how his teachings can help with the problem of unpopularity), Epicurus (who can help with the problem of not having enough money), Seneca (who offers consolations for frustration), Montaigne (who can help with feelings of inadequacy), Schopenhauer (who offers wisdom for coping with a broken heart), and Nietzsche (for coping with difficulties and obstacles). The book is serious, but done with a breezy, easy-to-understand style, is often aphoristic and/or humorous. There are many illustrations. It’s an easy book to enjoy, and I’m glad I read it a second time. And I need to track down copies of de Botton’s more recent books, several of which I haven’t yet read.

Books about Books

The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) by Holbrook Jackson

I’ve sometimes wondered what the “ideal” book for Calvin would be, and this one certainly answers that question – at least where nonfiction books are concerned. I’ve enjoyed dozens of “books about books” in my 50+ years of reading, and Jackson’s 650+ page tome is definitely the most wide-ranging of them all, and the most delightfully written. I’d heard of this book many years ago, but only recently got hold of a copy through Interlibrary Loan. One glance at the book’s table of contents, and reading of Jackson’s preface, and it was instantly clear to me that clear I needed to order myself a personal copy – regardless of the price. Which I did, and not only was every penny well-spent, but every hour spent reading it was full of marvels. Jackson intentionally modeled the style of his writing on Robert Burton’s famous Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1694), and Jackson’s imitation of Burton’s meandering, anecdote-crammed writing style is, by itself, one of the delicious pleasures of this book. Other pleasures include Jackson’s gift for distilling quotations – not all of them non-English languages translated into English by Jackson – from so many hundreds of essays, surveys, and memoirs of other writers, and from all periods and climes. The sheer scope of subtopics Jackson covers in his 30+ chapters is amazing, and also appreciated are Jackson’s sensible (and often humorous) judgments and digressions. Having devoted a month of my reading time to my first reading of Jackson’s book, it will take me more months (if not years) to re-read it to glean titles for one of my own “bibliomaniacal” projects: a checklist of “nonfiction books about books” that I started at my blog years ago: so many of the works Jackson cites are not yet included on my checklist, and I want to include almost all of them! The single reservation complicating my enjoyment of reading this book is the fact that, about three-quarters of the way through it, Jackson seems to circle back to topics he’s already discussed (and at length). That being said, the redundant quotations and additional anecdotes Jackson includes in the latter parts of his book are so delightful that I didn’t much mind that editing lapse; perhaps Jackson was simply too exhausted to do any further editing before sending his bulky manuscript off to the publisher? In any case, reading The Anatomy of Bibliomania is indisputably one of the highlights of my reading career, and any booklover – even if he or she merely randomly dips into it from time to time – would never regret owning a copy. And I was so smitten with Jackson’s semi-antique-now writing style that I’ll definitely be obtaining several of his dozen other books.

The Pleasures of Bookland (1910) by Joseph Shaylor

This is the first (and so far the only) ebook I’ve ever read. Although reading in this mode was unfamiliar, the content was delightful – and part of an ongoing project of mine: extracting from the books I read the nuggets I want to add to Cal’s Commonplace Book. As this book is a collection of bookish quotations, it was a gold mine, despite its age (or perhaps because of it). The screen-readable version I read I found via WorldCat, and now I have yet another reason to sing WorldCat’s praises. Browsing through the quotations about books and reading that Shaylor compiled and published so long ago confirms my belief that most of the most eloquent and/or memorable remarks that have been made about books and reading were written long ago – even if, ironically, the technology for efficiently and cheaply accessing those remarks is of relatively recent origin. Not only has my hoard of bookish quotations been enlarged by reading this book (despite its preponderance of poetic vs. prose tributes, the latter of which I prefer); reading this book in digital form has unexpectedly confirmed my willingness to read books (or at least certain books) on a screen.

Speaking of Books: The Best Things Ever Said about Books and Book Collecting (2001) edited by Rob Kaplan and Harold Rabinowitz

Having read, last year, the editors’ previous anthology of bookish quotations (A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury, 1999), I was thrilled to stumble across a copy of this later one. As I did with the first anthology, I found in it dozens of quotations – including several gleaned from their chapter introductions – that I’ve duly added to Cal’s Commonplace Book under each of the seven bookish headings there (Books, Book Collecting, Bookstores, Censorship, Libraries, Reading, and Reading and Writers)

Biblio-Style: How We Live at Home with Books (2019) by Nina Freudenberger

Although this book had long been listed in the “Home Libraries” section of my blog’s checklist of Nonfiction Books about Books, I’d never seen a copy until I recently stumbled across it in a local used bookstore that I’d somehow neglected revisiting for the past ten years. Biblio-Style is a series of sumptuously photographed glimpses of over thirty-two book enthusiasts’ homes or workplaces. These mostly-large personal collections are located in various towns on two continents: England, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, and Italy in Europe, and the United States (mostly California and New York) and Mexico in North America. Along with drool-worthy photographs of the libraries are photos of and comments made by their owners: designers, bookstore owners, and aristocratic collectors as well as a satisfying smattering of writers. The accompanying text briefly describes the particular interests of each of these booklovers (including several bookloving couples), and remarks on how their collections are arranged, but it’s the photos that led me to buy a copy of this coffee-table-sized compendium. It’ll be nice to be reminded, whenever I again leaf through this wonderful book, that more than a few people who have a lot more money than I or most booklovers will ever have chose to lavish part of their wealth on creating luxurious homes for their own beloved volumes.

The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus (2008) by Joshua Kendall

I probably bought my copy of Roget’s Thesaurus (the 1963 edition) during my college (or even high school) years, and remember how important it seemed at the time that I needed to own a copy: as a word-besotted person even then, I must’ve assumed that its comprehensive list of synonyms (and antonymns) would come in handy in whatever wordsmithing I imagined I’d be occupied with during and after my undergraduate years. I also remember how amazed I was that anyone could have had the patience and tenacity to compile such a linguistic treasure. I don’t remember using my copy all that often – it’s been decades since I last consulted it (probably for an elusive answer to a crossword puzzle clue) – but for some reason (the aforementioned word-besottedness, perhaps?) I’ve never gotten around to discarding it. (Even though I did finally discard my equally treasured unabridged dictionary, once dictionaries – and, for that matter, thesauruses – became digitally available. In any case, when I espied this biography of Roget at my local library, I borrowed it to find out more about its inventor (or, as the book explains, the man who, beginning with an 1832 precursor publication, perfected a product invented hundreds of years before Roget was born by a Latin-using monastery scribe. Roget (1769-1869) lived a long, eventful, and family-troubled life; part of the interest in his biography is the part Roget played in the various literary, scientific, and philosophical ferment of his generation. He also travelled a great deal, and moved in certain aristocratic circles in England (and knew Benjamin Franklin’s son). That he managed to produce something so useful, despite many dispiriting obstacles, setbacks, and disadvantages (some of them social, some of them hereditary or familial) – as well as Roget’s decidedly non-social personal disposition – is almost miraculous. I came away with an even higher level of appreciation for his accomplishments (of which his Thesaurus was only one).

The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (2025) by Andrew Hui

Yes, I learned from this book some cool stuff about writers I’ve long cared about (particularly Montaigne) and about writers who this book made me care more about (Petrarch, Dante, St. Jerome, Cervantes, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Christopher Marlowe). However, the academic jargon in which Hui’s stories are embedded tempted me, far more than a few times, to abandon it. (I kept wishing there was an industry – or more editors – devoted to translating into everyday English for general readers all scholarly prose, like Hui’s, that is clearly – i.e., unclearly – written in Foucaultian jargon by and for fellow academics. Or perhaps I should be more wary of choosing to read any book published by any university-based publishing company – which would, however, rule out my tracking down instead either of the two books by other authors Hui mentions in the bibliographic essay appended to his text: The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (1997) or A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe (2023). In any case, the annoyingly-phrased book I did read ranges over many more topics than its title suggests: Hui devotes as much of his text to explicating (sometimes in maddening detail) analyses of particular works of Western or Eastern art (for example, every single extant drawing or painting of St. Jerome, or every depiction of the book-holding Virgin Mary in every famous Annunciation-themed painting) as he devotes to writers and accounts of their private lairs – the topic I was hoping this book would focus on. (Fortunately, Hui includes images for the many works he discusses.) What seems to be the actual topic of Hui’s book is the way a writer’s – or a fictional character’s – devotion to books can become obsessive and/or destructive (like Don Quixote’s or Faust’s) instead of benign and/or admirable (like Montaigne’s or Petrarch’s): bibliomania instead of bibliophilia. This theme of Hui’s I found to be more intriguing (and disturbing, when I try to locate my own habits along this spectrum) than what (little) Hui has to say about the history of the writer’s studio.

A Passion for Books (1998) by Terry W. Glaspey

I found this book in a used bookstore in Pennsylvania on a recent road trip Randy and I made. It’s a small-format, very short book (barely a hundred pages), but I’m a sucker for any affordable or borrowable book that praises the pleasures of reading, and this beautifully-illustrated collection of bookish quotations was no exception. I enjoyed it not only for my gleanings from it for several relevant sections of Cal’s Commonplace Book, but for the excellence and charm of Glaspey’s personal recollections of his own journeys in Bookland that he intersperses among the quotations he features.

Difficult-to-Classify

The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (1967) by Robert Farrar Capon

This is one of the oddest books I’ve ever read – but in a good way. Ostensibly a cookbook, it’s actually a decidedly opinionated plea for ordinary people to place cooking and eating near the top of life’s pleasures. The first two-thirds of the book is devoted to instructions – with multiple and lengthy asides – for preparing a single dish (“leg of lamb for eight, four times”); the remaining third of the text consists of recipes for other things. The oddness comes from the author’s tone: he infuses his enthusiasms with amusing flights of fancy, including mini-sermons and wildly extended similies and metaphors – all of it laced with, of all things, theological reflections about the proper place of food, conviviality, rationales for doing things the author’s way instead of any other way, etc. Capon was an Episcopal priest, but his “culinary reflection” is probably the only theology-inflected cookbook ever published. It is a book to be relished, regardless of how difficult it is to describe. (The New York Times reviewer dubbed it “one of the funniest, wisest, and most unorthodox cookbooks ever written.” This is not an exaggeration.) Capon’s chapter-long hymn to the onion and his paean to bicarbonate of soda are, all by themselves, worth the effort to read this book. But it takes no effort, really, to read it: it’s unalloyed enjoyment throughout.