Happy Friday, nonfiction fans! It really has been A WEEK, has it not? I was trying to put together a reading list to help make sense of the Supreme Court, but my brain just isn’t working in peak condition right now.
Instead, I want to catch up on some nonfiction news that’s been building for a few weeks – everything from some book announcements to a powerful excerpt I urge you to read!
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Actress Betty Gilpin is writing a book! All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns, out September 6, is described as “a hilarious, intimate, and candid collection of essays.” In an interview, Gilpin said that the book won’t be a “tell all” about her TV and film roles, but rather how those experiences connect to being a woman in the world and managing all of the voices that try to tell you what to do and how to act. I love this cover!
The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize have been announced. This particular prize has a lot of great nonfiction selections to highlight:
- Biography – Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster
- Autobiographical Prose – Real Estate: A Living Autobiography by Deborah Levy
- Current Interest – Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could by Adam Schiff
- History – Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer
- Science and Technology – The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
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LitHub ran a great excerpt from Tajja Isen’s new book Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service. In the piece, she writes about how “the failure of progressive change in contemporary book publishing is so total that there is now a whole string of books about the failure of progressive change in contemporary book publishing.” She specifically writes about a few recent fiction titles, but I think her commentary is more broadly applicable. This excerpt definitely got the book on my radar!
Biographer Walter Isaacson is working on a book about Elon Musk. Isaacson, who has written about Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs, said he was interested in profiling Musk because he is “interested in innovators and people who push boundaries.” I can’t really bring myself to get excited about this one, but I did think the interview linked above was an interesting peek into why Isaacson wants to write this book and what we might read in the future.
Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!
One Thing I Like
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One of the books I picked up during my independent bookstore shopping spree was The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum. It’s a slim little book that manages to give a comprehensive and entertaining overview of how weather forecasting actually works… and how fragile the whole system could turn out to be.
To explore the forecast, Blum shares a brief history of weather forecasting, visits remote weather observation stations, watches weather satellites blast off, and visits the site of one of forecasting’s biggest and most accurate computation systems. This book, which I read in just a few hours, gave me a much deeper appreciation about everything it takes so I can turn on my phone in the morning to find out if it’s going to rain. Highly recommended!
For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork. Happy weekend!