Hello! It’s May and yet it’s 45 degrees in Chicago. We just had all our cherry blossom trees bloom here (as I think they did basically everywhere in the last couple weeks?), but they’ve already started turning green (bah!), which is all the more reason to seize the day, cherry blossom-wise, and gather your photos while ye may.
I’ve been audiobooking Endurance by Alfred Lansing about the Shackleton expedition, and wow, I feel like I would have just laid myself right down on the ice and told them to abandon me. So cold! So much eating of seal blubber! But they all lived, which is bananacrackers. Well done, all those people.
Be My Baby: A Memoir by Ronnie Spector
“But Alice,” you say, “hasn’t this been out for thirty years?” Yes! But now, this 1990 music memoir has a new postscript by the late Ronnie Spector. Spector’s book covers her time as lead singer of the Ronettes (who sing the eponymous excellent song) and her emotionally abusive marriage to music producer Phil Spector. Rolling Stone named this one of the best rock memoirs of all time, and there are so many of those!
Travels with Trilobites: Adventures in the Paleozoic by Andy Secher
Trilobites!! So many of them in the past. So weird. They lived from over 500 million years ago (again, Neanderthals were around like…35,000 years ago) to over 250 million years ago. They were alive so long ago but also alive for so long! You can find their fossils in Siberia, Morocco, Australia. This tells their history and has hundreds of photos of them. The author is a “field associate in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History” and personally owns more than 4,000 trilobite fossils. Again — there’s someone for every interest.
You’ve Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar by Pyae Moe Thet War
Ooo this is all about what it’s like to be a Myanmar person, in yet another interesting release from Catapult. Pyae looks at the “knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today.” Also things like “the patriarchal Myanmar concept of hpone which governs how laundry is done,” and just, dang. Catapult is definitely a newer press and they keep publishing things I want to read.
Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!
For more nonfiction reads, check out the For Real podcast which I co-host with the excellent Kim here at Book Riot. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.