Linda
Easy and enjoyably consumable. Finished it in two sittings, which is kind of incredible for my deteriorating brain these days. Leans a bit too heavily into speculation, includes jump scare detours to talk about the 2016 elections.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
A really, really good book for people managers, soon to be people managers, and everybody who needs to embrace feedback.
I genuinely read this because I wanted to read an epistolary romance, and basically anybody who has read this book is now laughing hysterically. I am in absolutely no way a prude, but damn do I have no idea how I feel about this book.
Gorgeously written and brilliantly researched. The gut punch transition from the joyful equity of Genghis Khan’s original rule and the hellish cruelty and incompetence of his sons was hell to read. Really really fantastic book.
It's not the book, it's me. I made it all the way to chapter three, where the author was with the patience of a saint and very small words, trying to help people like me understand the concept of shapes, and I realized every additional thing I learned was making it worse. Loved the illustrations and the challenge to the way we typically view mathematics, but probably not for people with profound dyscalculia.
Reading Antonia Fraser writing on the women that spangled Louis XIV's court makes you incredibly grateful for her scholarship and fluid prose, especially if you've read a locus of writing on the subject. Fraser's survey of Louis the XIV's female influences is fascinatingly comprehensive, interestingly salacious, and curiously journalistic. Most historians tend to take a point of view and set up camp there, and not many have the conviction or steady hand for their thesis to be, “it's complicated.” Fraser pulls it off in this book without seeming waffling or poorly researched, and every relationship documented – from Louis and his mother to Louis and Madam Right Now – is nuanced and rich. As much as I loved it, so much of the momentum for reading this book (especially in the second half) was motivated by personal interest in the subject, and not particularly driven by captivating storytelling. Partly that's a function of Louis getting older, slowing down, settling down with his secret morganatic marriage and ceasing his habitual tapping of every piece of available ass in court. Partly it's because the second half loses its tight narrative focus on Louis, having to spend a lot more time branching outward to cover the various tragic deaths of his dauphin, his other dauphin, the dauphiness – essentially everybody at court. Fantastic, comprehensive reading if this subject is in your sweet spot, but not recommended for general curious audiences.
Disappointing. Fascinating topic presented with a lot of fabulist thinking, limited historical detail and the sort of charming aside that really only works if it really is an aside. I feel like I spent more time learning about the author's imagination and travel than getting any clear understanding of the topic, and in the end, the conclusion he reaches feels unearned in the context of the information he's provided.
How you take the story of Madame de Pompadour and make it painfully milquetoast I don't even know but it's been accomplished with aplomb. Poorly organized (lots of jumping backward and forward in time cut in with sections that begin to broach interesting subjects that are abruptly snapped off with, “but more on this later” like a bad television cliffhanger) and given to promulgating easily debunked pieces of historical nonsense (ie: Athenais was not using witchcraft; no one who spends more than 12 minutes researching Athenais thinks she actually indulged in black magic; come on, seriously?) and dourly written. A book about sex and intrigue and power and intellectual romance in France that lacks all of the above. Except for the Frenchness. Loathe it. Save your money.
A really interesting book for food history and cooking aficionados, but sadly confirms that English food is sort of terrible from past to present. Even accounting for changing standards of taste, seriously, there are a lot of foods into which one should not add cinnamon or cloves. Either way, it's a great marriage of history and food and literature, actually, since Annette Hope tracks the history of food in London through writers and diaries, from Chaucer and Shakespeare and Evelyn through Oscar Wilde. But no, the recipes are terrible. Do not read this book for the recipes.
Beautifully photographed, and accompanied with wonderful and intimate interviews. One of the best books I have ever owned, and one i return to over and over again. It lives on my coffee table and I take it to bed with me a lot to read over. The interviews and pictures are sort of dated by now, but if you're at all interested in the experience of being female in all corners of the world, this is unmissable. You have to read this book. It's lush.
Fantastically detailed and fascinatingly inside baseball about the political shenanigans of the Vatican viewed through the lens of a compelling main character navigating his own ongoing crisis of faith. I think I loved 95% of this book, but felt the ending was so abrupt. I literally sat there staring at the last pages saying, "Wait, what?" out loud for a beat. That said, still loved the twist, the intrigue, and the pageantry.
Of the three Bourdain books I've read, this one is right in the middle. Funny and dishy as always, and Bourdain has important leanings insofar as traveling and writing that are right up my alley: eating and consuming alcohol. But I have to say that this book, while very enjoyable, didn't leave the sort of resonant impression that Kitchen Confidential did, and that when someone asked to borrow it, I surrendered it without a lot of second-guessing and possessiveness, which I find usually to be a sign, since nobody ever really “borrows” a book.
Incredibly, incredibly wonderful book. Young adult fiction at its very best, I think. It's about Sparrow Delaney and her incredibly zany family that lives on a commune, and her attempt to pass as a norm in school. Oh yeah, she can see spirits. It's an incredibly rough adolescence. All of those pieces sound like a terrible Disney Channel movie, I recognize, but the story is put together very carefully, and each of the characters is individually lovely and interesting. I got it as an advanced reader copy from our review department and finished it in a day, I couldn't put it down.
One of the funniest and best books about eating and restaurants and our pathos about knowing who the New York Times food critic is in the world.
My favorite of Kathyrn Harrison's novels, that darts between two women in vastly different social spheres and suffer this sort of debilitating and bleak lack of choice that I only really truly understood toward the very end. I found this paralyzingly creepy, but maybe that was only me. And maybe it's just Kathryn Harrison – whose work I usually find paralyzingly creepy on some degree.
Bought this in a secondhand shop off of Rue de Severin in Paris and consumed it by the time I was back in London less than a week later. A really gorgeous, lively biography of a really gorgeous and lively woman, and it has one of the best lines about Eleanor of Aquitaine, about how she was the wife of two kings and the mother of Richard the Lionhearted, but whenever we think of her, we only ever think of her as Eleanor. Really, really wonderful.
By now, anybody picking up a Mary Roach book knows that they're going to find something exhaustively and joyfully researched, packed with quirky tidbits, and written with that often-missing light hand and appreciation for the absurd. Apply all of that to the fundamentally absurd business of space travel and you have Packing for Mars. This book is incredibly charming, with something both for those overflowing with prurient interest (pooping in space! poop flying around in space! sex in space!) to the fascinating details nobody ever thinks about, but that become vital once Roach explains them. I actually stole this book from a houseguest (sorry, Ross), and I'm glad I did because like her other books, Packing for Mars was excellent reading and the perfect book for a long commute. (If I had to rank this among her other books, I'd say this was better than Spook – by far the weakest of her books, I think – and slightly better than Bonk, although nothing will ever come close to the revelatory wonder and tenderness of Stiff.)
It's about football, data, and families. Also, in the movie version, Sandra Bullock played a Sassy Southern Lady. I was never not going to love this book, all right?
This was definitely a trainwreck book. I won't say I didn't enjoy it, because obviously I finished it, but it was a sort of perverse curiosity enjoyment. This is the sort of romance novel people who hate romance novels indicate to argue their point about it being a blighted genre.
I finished this one in one long gulp in a London to San Francisco flight and came off the plane feeling it all the way in my fingers and toes. I think I have always loved science writing because while I loved science, the math of it evaded me, and to access the curiosities of the subject I've always had to go in through the side door of the scientists and subjects themselves. This is one of the best and most intimate books of that nature I've ever read. Given the endless impact of Henrietta Lacks and her cells on medicine and science, I can't believe I went through my entire life without knowing anything about her. Absolutely everybody should read this. It can be grisly at times, but this book is hugely eye-opening and wonderfully researched.
Third in the Material World series, as far as I'm concerned, only this time it's about how people eat and interact with food and how all of that is changing. The profiles of the two families in China – one in rural, one in Beijing – are startlingly telling, and so were the profiles of the English and American families. I never get sick of looking at what people are eating or how they cook it, and what it says about people to see how they consume.
Another brilliant and fascinating book, where they go to different families the world over and turn out their houses. Just the differences between what people own is amazing. I used to work at Ten Thousand Villages and would leave a copy of this at the front counter to reread it in between customers.
Exhaustively researched and wonderfully dense, this is the sort of book that takes you ages to read and you don't mind that it does – it took me about six months, total to finish it. It's also dangerous for art fiends and museum lovers because it really highlights the massive moral gray zone in which most of those institutions operate. I love the Met, but what of the provenance for a number of its pieces? And ultimately, do I care that much, as long as I can go there and see such beautiful art? It's a book that makes you sort of uncomfortable, as well as teaching you an enormous amount, absolutely recommended for anybody interested in art. Or stealing shit to sell to the Getty.