Non-Fiction

Everybody effing read this.

Educated by Tara Westover

December 31, 2018 by narfna 4 Comments

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, […]

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Educated by Tara Westover

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12/31/2018 narfna's CBR10 Review No:175 |

Don’t let the cover mislead you. There are no grizzlies on the Appalachian Trail.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

December 18, 2018 by narfna 4 Comments

I added this book to my TBR the very first day I joined Goodreads in July 2008, so yes I do feel accomplished for finally having read it. And it was a good time! I was a bit worried based on a few reviews I’d read ahead of time that it would be dated, and it was a tiny bit (mostly in some jokes Bryson makes that read a little fatphobic to my 2018 eyes and ears, but would have been absolutely bog standard in 1998). But overall, this read like any other Bryson book I’ve read. He’s an observant […]

12/18/2018 narfna's CBR10 Review No:165 |

“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

December 14, 2018 by narfna Leave a Comment

I basically read this all in one sitting last Saturday morning. It’s a relative short book at around 220 pages, but I think I would have wanted to read it fast even if it were 400. Nichole Chung, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s read her other work (I’ve mostly done so on The (dearly departed) Toast), is a very good writer. In fact, she started writing about adoption years before this book was published; I remember reading several of her articles about it and thinking at the time that she should write a book. And hey, here it is! And hey, […]

12/14/2018 narfna's CBR10 Review No:164 |

My favorite book of 2018

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

December 4, 2018 by dAvid 2 Comments

It’s official: I have the yips. I finished reading this book three weeks ago, but every time I’ve tried to write a review, I freeze, not because I have nothing to say but because I can’t seem to calm my mind enough to write the review this book deserves. For you see: Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is my favorite book of the year. Chee shares essays about his life and writing career, keeping the subjects separate at first, then integrating them more and more as the book progresses. He writes about a summer exchange program in […]

12/4/2018 dAvid's CBR10 Review No:64 |

I too did not like this. #CBRBingo #Blackout!?

My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands by Chelsea Handler

December 1, 2018 by narfna 4 Comments

Well I tell you what, this book. It was just unpleasant. I would not have picked this up if it weren’t for bingo, and none of the other choices looked at all appealing. I thought, well if you pick that one at least you won’t be bored! And that was true. But my version of not being bored mostly consisted of me yelling at my audiobook about how much I disliked almost everything that was going on. Maybe she is a different author now but at the very least this book has not aged well, and at most I really […]

12/1/2018 narfna's CBR10 Review No:160 |

All of this has happened before.

So Say We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica by Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross

November 30, 2018 by narfna 2 Comments

“Eddie sat us all down as the cast and went, ‘The show’s going to go for five years. Five years. Every episode is going to be like a movie. Keep your powder dry. We’re in here for the long haul. Nobody’s to make fun of this. There’ll be enough people anyway who want to cut a swath in us some way or rubbish the idea, or they’re not going to be fully on board, because we’ve got this title.‘Battlestar Galactica—that’s a blessing as well as perhaps a bit of a poisoned chalice. Nobody needs to take this as seriously as […]

11/30/2018 narfna's CBR10 Review No:153 |

I was pleasantly surprised to be so absorbed in this book – cbr10bingo Delicious!

Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi

November 8, 2018 by Dome'Loki 3 Comments

A friend game me Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi as a birthday present. She acknowledged that non-fiction isn’t really my thing but she thought I might find it interesting. She hadn’t read the book herself but had heard good things about it. I don’t recall ever having read an autobiography, or biography for that matter. And my friend was completely correct about me not being into non-fiction. This is only my second non-fiction book this year out of my current 47 reviews. Before starting this book I knew two things about Padma Lakshmi, that she modeled […]

11/8/2018 Dome'Loki's CBR10 Review No:47 |

And not a duck to be seen!

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen

November 3, 2018 by crystalclear 3 Comments

Quackery: A Brief History on the Worst Ways to Cure Everything is indeed what it says on the box. We have an intro into what each method is, and then how awful it was and why. It’s very informative, but for each thing it comes across as a Very Big Deal. Each of these methods were indeed used, but it seems like the authors over-inflate their importance. Mercury (I’m sure everyone knows by now that medically, Mercury is a Very Bad Thing) Antimony (I wasn’t familiar with this, and forgot it was even an element (Number 51, Sb). […]

11/3/2018 crystalclear's CBR10 Review No:37 |