You know when you go to a new bookstore and it’s amazing and you’re like WOW this city is really worth coming back to? This happened to me in Austin (BookPeople!!) and then last weekend, I was in the Twin Cities and wow. Wow. So many bookstores. I had no idea, despite like 40% of people I know living in the Twin Cities (including Kim from this newsletter and For Real!).
I texted Kim and asked her which she’d recommend the most and one she and others recommended was Magers & Quinn. It’s really big AND really windy, so you get to wander around aisles. But organized aisles. And it has used and new books, so I got a copy of Simon Schama’s 1989 history of the French Revolution for like $4. My wife and I bought five books each, and I didn’t even look at the FICTION section. Like a whole major section unexamined. That is for next time!
Anyway, new nonfiction for this week!:
Burning My Roti: Breaking Barriers as a Queer Indian Woman by Sharan Dhaliwal
Burnt Roti is the UK’s leading South Asian magazine, which talks about mental health and sexuality as they impact young creatives (among other things). Dhaliwal’s book of the same name is part-memoir and part discussion of topics like body hair, colorism, “and a particular focus on the suffocating beauty standards South Asian women are expected to adhere to.” I’m really feeling this almost ’70s color palate/illustration on the cover!
The Trayvon Generation: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow by Elizabeth Alexander
In June 2020, poet Alexander wrote an essay in The New Yorker entitled “The Trayvon Generation,” which “incisively and lovingly observed the experiences, attitudes, and cultural expressions of what she referred to as the Trayvon Generation, who even as children could not be shielded from the brutality that has affected the lives of so many Black people.” This expands her original essay into book form and is definitely worth picking up not only for its subject matter, but because nonfiction by poets tends to be amazing.
Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century by Stephen Galloway
This cover!! Ok, this is a massive biography of a romance — the romance of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. They were married from 1940 to 1960, starred in films and plays together, and finally divorced, at least in part due to Leigh’s struggles with her mental illness. Wikipedia cites this as bipolar disorder, but I want to read the book before saying this is definitely true. Leigh died of tuberculosis at age 53. If you have not seen them in That Hamilton Woman, you should! They are a Golden Age of Hollywood power couple that I’ve loved since I was a teenager. Hurray for the Oliviers.
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.