People you should meet…

Trawling my TBR shelves the other day, I realized that I have quite a few autobiographies and biographies about various people so thought I would gather these titles together in case you might be interested. One caveat: these are TBR which means that I haven’t read them just yet. They look good though!

• A Girl Named Zippy – Haven Kimmel. This was LOL hilarious when I read it a few years back…
• She Got Up Off the Couch and Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana – Haven Kimmel (part two of above auto.)
• Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature – Linda Lear.
• Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald – Matthew J. Broccoli.
• Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter  – Adeline Yen Mah. A powerful autobiography about growing up in China.
• Charles Dickens: A Life – Claire Tomalin.
• The Glass Castle: A Memoir – Jeanette Walls.
• Lab Girl – Hope Jahren.
• The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras – Brantley Hargrove.

• Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard – Sara Wheeler.
• A Promised Land – Barack Obama.
• Becoming Queen Victoria – Kate Williams.
• Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor – Robert Lacey. A fast read of the life and times of QEII (up to 1983, when book was first published). Just finished this. An enjoyable and rather fluffy read.
• Hillary Rodham Clinton: Living History – Hillary Rodham Clinton.
• Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions – David Attenborough.
• Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster – David Attenborough.

• Everybody was so Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story – Amanda Vaill.
• A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
• The Short and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton: The First Domestic Goddess – Kathryn Hughes.
• The Victorians – A.N. Wilson.
• The English: A Portrait of a People – Jeremy Paxman. (A DNF in the end. Just couldn’t get on with his writing style.)

• The Girls from Winnetka – Marcia Chellis.
• Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle – The Countess of Carnarvon.

Now I just to read them all. HA!

A different kind of reading…

Last weekend was a longer break than typical since it was Labor Day, which typically signals for many people, that summer is over. (Not by temperatures since around here, we’re still in the 90s during the day, but in terms of the monthly calendar.) Seeing as we didn’t have a lot scheduled, I planned to do some shopping (shoes :-}) and a lot of reading.

(Outcome was successful, although I’m truly dreadful at buying shoes. We’ll see how this pair work out for me! But come on – leopard-skin Keds? How can you go far wrong with those? I’m trying to be on-trend this autumn (for the first time in ages), and apparently, fake leopard is very in. 🙂 )

To the reading: The Superhero had to work on Monday which meant a quiet day in our house (apart from Nova Dog barking at all those people who have the gall to walk by our house without a hall pass). I happened to clean out the magazine rack and in doing so, was reminded of two mags which I’ve had for more-than-enough time to read them. Yesterday was that day. (See pic above for deets.)

The first was a special issue from the New Yorker with a bunch of true crime stories that they had culled from years of earlier issues, and that included the old chestnut from Truman Capote (the first installment of “In Cold Blood”). I haven’t read this since my freshman year in college when I was fresh off the boat from England, so didn’t really remember much of it, but it was such a good read that now I’m interested in reading the entire book by Capote. It was the one of the earliest examples of narrative nonfiction (or longform nonfiction) and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t appreciate it for what it was when I read it back then. Now it’s on the list for the next visit to the library.

Other true crime stories were spread over the last forty years of the twentieth century but I wasn’t really familiar with the crimes they mentioned. Still – overall, a pretty good read. Glad I’ve read it, glad it’s off the pile, but one day later, pretty forgettable. :-}

The other mag that I had pulled from this pile was from a writing conference I attended last year about writing narrative nonfiction. This journal was put out by the sponsoring university and included the year’s best writing (as chosen by judges from the conference). A good selection of pretty diverse nonfiction, but as above, one day later, I can’t really remember any of the individual stories. (I am now worrying whether this says a lot about me as a reader! Maybe I need to start being a lot more intentional when I read!!)

I enjoyed this taste of nonfiction essays and learned a lot about how to structure a similar one should I end up writing something along these same lines. It was a good change of pace from longer reads and fit my Monkey Mind of the other day! Plus – off the pile and out of the house.

Win-win.