Home / Blog Menu ↓

Booknotes 2.6

Nonfiction

  • Draft No. 4, by John McPhee, on writing nonfiction. I hadn’t read anything of his before this. Mostly enjoyed it. The Kedit section interested me a lot. And this was fun: “The planet, of course, is covered with demonyms, and after scouring the world in conversations on this topic with Mary Norris I began a severely selective, highly subjective A-list, extending Mancunian and Vallisoletano through thirty-five others at this writing, including Wulfrunian (Wolverhampton), Novocastrian (Newcastle), Trifluvian (Trois-Rivières), Leodensian (Leeds), Minneapolitan (Minneapolis), Hartlepudlian (Hartlepool), Liverpudlian (you knew it), Haligonian (Halifax), Varsovian (Warsaw), Providentian (Providence), and Tridentine (Trent).”
  • Convictions, by John Kroger, about life as a federal prosecutor (an AUSA, more specifically). Really liked it, especially the mafia, 9/11, and Enron parts. Parts of it kind of made me wish that I’d gone to law school. Apparently I really like legal nonfiction. (Less so the illegal stuff, har har.)

Fiction

  • All This Will be Yours, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Novella about time travel. It’s fairly silly, but there were some interesting ideas, which I think is largely why I read Tchaikovsky. At some point I need to go back and finish the Children of Time series.
  • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. A reread, for book group. Loved it just as much if not more this time round. So, so good. Epistolary fiction is my jam.