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I’m so very far behind in keeping up with this thread! Love everyone’s reviews/assessments and recommendations!
I just read this LA Times piece about a new book/memoir from a school librarian in Louisiana.
Here’s a link to a non-paywalled version:
As someone whose reading experiences were highly influenced by school and public library librarians, and who long thought she’d grow up to be a librarian, this whole idea of book bans makes me livid.
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Yay! Would love to know what you think of them!
I had to give back ‘Ultra-Processed People’—my loan time was over. I skimmed most of it. Some good, mostly too technical for me at this time.
Still reading ‘The Bushbaby’ in between publications: National Geographic, AARP, The New Yorker, Nutrition Action…
I heard this morning that ‘The Onion’ is back in print!
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I skimmed through both, thought they were too long.
Have you seen the movie Salvador with James Woods? Explains that period well.
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Amen, sista! As a retired librarian, I am absolutely horrified by the heightened current trend to squash literature, individuality and creativity. Fahrenheit 451.
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I’m sorry they weren’t the right books for you. I’ve two other ideas:
Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces - about a Sudanese immigrant in Canada. From the publisher:
From one of the most beloved media personalities of his generation comes a one-of-a-kind reflection on Blackness, faith, language, pop culture, and the challenges and rewards of finding your way in the world.
Professional wrestling super fandom, Ontario’s endlessly unfurling 401 highway, late nights at the convenience store listening to heavy metal—for writer and podcast host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, these are the building blocks of a life. Son of Elsewhere charts that life in wise, funny, and moving reflections on the many threads that weave together into an identity.
Arriving in Canada at age 12 from Sudan, Elamin’s teenage years were spent trying on new ways of being in the world, new ways of relating to his almost universally white peers. His is a story of yearning to belong in a time and place where expectation and assumptions around race, faith, language, and origin make such belonging extremely difficult, but it’s also a story of the surprising and unexpected ways in which connection and acceptance can be found.
In this extraordinary debut collection, the process of growing—of trying, failing, and trying again to fit in—is cast against the backdrop of the memory of life in a different time, and different place—a Khartoum being bombed by the United States, a nation seeking to define and understand itself against global powers of infinite reach.
Taken together, these essays explore how we pick and choose from our experience and environment to help us in the ongoing project of defining who we are—how, for instance, the example of Mo Salah, the profound grief practices of Islam, the nerdy charm of The O.C. 's Seth Cohen, and the long shadow of colonialism can cohere into a new and powerful whole.
With the perfect balance of relatable humor and intellectual ferocity, Son of Elsewhere confronts what we know about ourselves, and most important, what we’re still learning.
Second idea is Borges and Me: An Encounter
I found this to be delightful and quite funny.
From the publisher:
In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn.
Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery tour of an era, like our own, in which uncertainties abound, and when—as ever—it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.
Edited to add: I have a list of other interesting memoirs (at least I found them interesting), but I think they might be on the longish side for your current tastes. But …
The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
This was fascinating!
From the publisher:
A boldly rendered—and deeply intimate—account of Hong Kong today, from a resilient young woman whose stories explore what it means to survive in a city teeming with broken promises.
“[A] pulsing debut . . . about what it means to find your place in a city as it vanishes before your eyes.”—The New York Times Book Review
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post
Hong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally—often in vain—against threats to their fundamental freedoms. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. Drawing from her own experience reporting on the politics and culture of her hometown, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have watched their home transform, Karen Cheung gives us a rare insider’s view of this remarkable city at a pivotal moment—for Hong Kong and, ultimately, for herself.
Born just before the handover to China in 1997, Cheung grew up questioning what version of Hong Kong she belonged to. Not quite at ease within the middle-class, cosmopolitan identity available to her at her English-speaking international school, she also resisted the conservative values of her deeply traditional, often dysfunctional family.
Through vivid and character-rich stories, Cheung braids a dual narrative of her own coming of age alongside that of her generation. With heartbreaking candor, she recounts her yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests. Cheung also captures moments of miraculous triumph, documenting Hong Kong’s vibrant counterculture and taking us deep into its indie music and creative scenes. Inevitably, she brings us to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized.
An exhilarating blend of memoir and reportage, The Impossible City charts the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory paths of coming into one’s own.
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Thanks a lot, I’ll look up to see if I can get them.
I didn’t explain very well why I didn’t take to those other two books. I don’t mind long books, these just seemed unnecessarily long. I really don’t know how to explain it.
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I love reading memoirs and biographies. In the last few months I’ve read Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne, Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post (fictionalized bio), Being Henry by Henry Winkler, Any Given Tuesday-A Political Love Story by Lis Smith, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick (fascinating) and Simple Dreams by Linda Ronstadt. Some of my favorites of the past few years have been Save Me The Plums and Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl, Chasing History by Carl Bernstein, Boys in Trees by Carly Simon and the superb memoir by Katherine Graham, Personal History. Got about halfway through Streisand memoir and boy did she need an editor.
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Exactly the same when I read Streisand’s book … where was the editor? I finished it but about ⅓ should have been cut out.
Have you read Whoopie’s latest memoir? I loved it.
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Thanks for all the recommendations; I was able to download some ebooks from my library!
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I’m pretty far into Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stroudt. Enjoying it a lot. Reminds me of Cheever, Updike, and Munro.
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Great. I just started using Libby and Hoopla and I’ve got Hotel California to finish in the next few days. Great history of the rise of singer songwriters in the late 60’s and 70’s centered around LA and especially Laurel Canyon. Perfect ebook to drift off to sleep to.
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Did you see the tv special of this? Excellent acting. Memorable.
Frances McDormand
Bill Murray
Richard Jenkins
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I’ve read Elizabeth Strout’s last two books (Oh William and Lucy by the Sea) and need to read some of her earlier books. She has a new one coming out very soon.
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I always like to read thrillers and mysteries set in my travel destinations.
These look like a good choice; I’ve borrowed the first three on Liddy.
I might have to try watching Three Pines again!
Did you mean to say Libby?
Yes!
I just finished The Last Act of Juliet Willoughby by Ellery Lloyd. I really enjoyed the combination of mystery, art history and academia, interesting characters, etc.
An interesting article in Time Magazine 
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