Category: True Story

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True Story

Reading Cookbooks Under the Sea

Hello hello, nonfiction friends! I have spent much of this week watching the Olympics, checking in on sports that I only watch every four years like speed skating and cross country skiing. Truthfully, the thing I love the most is when they switch to family and friends watching at home – makes me tear up every single time. 

book cover maus by art spiegelman

Before sharing some nonfiction news, I want to follow up on the topic of last Friday’s newsletter – a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman’s Maus – with a few additional Book Riot resources on book bans and censorship that can help you take meaningful action in these areas:

  • One common argument around book bans is that banning books will actually make them more popular because they’re forbidden. Danika Ellis explains this idea – the Streisand effect – and why it doesn’t hold up when we talk about censorship. 
  • For some specific and practical tips, I highly recommend this article from Kelly Jensen– How to Fight Book Bans and Challenges: An Anti-Censorship Tool Kit
  • This week, Kelly also shared tips for how to use FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) to learn about book challenges. These are excellent tips that show how simple it is to request information from a local government entity. But keep in mind, many of the things you might want – meeting agendas or minutes, for example – might already be publicly available if you dig just a little bit. 

And with that, let’s share some additional nonfiction news from the last couple of weeks: 

Two highly-anticipated cookbooks are likely sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after the container they were in was swept off a ship during transport. The two affected authors, Mason Hereford and Melissa Clark, have some funny comments in the linked article that I truly appreciate… but gosh, what ridiculous luck.

Inventing Anna, the Shonda Rhimes-created Netflix show about the Soho Scammer, is available starting today… and there’s already been some interesting commentary about it. Anna herself wrote a piece for Insider that has a real tone of aggrievement that I’m not sure is warranted. And then Rachel DeLoache Williams, Anna’s former best friend, condemned the show “as an attempt to rehabilitate the image of the convicted scammer.” So much delicious drama!

And finally, a couple of exciting memoir announcements to share: 

  • Spice Girl Mel C (aka Sporty Spice) will be releasing a memoir, Who I Am: My Story, on September 22. 
  • Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility project, will release her memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life on September 6.

Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!

One Thing I Like

book cover the curse of the boyfriend sweater

In an effort to keep my hands busy instead of scrolling on my phone, I’ve been making a renewed effort at knitting. This weekend I started my first sock, which feels like a true level up in my extremely basic knitting skills. There are many, many memoirs centered around the benefits of crafting. One that came to mind that I read and enjoyed was The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater: Essays on Crafting by Alanna Okun. It’s a very charming, warm book about lessons learned from knitting and making. 

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

Finally! Don’t forget to check out our new line of bookish, Wordle-inspired merch! There are mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, and more. The campaign is temporary, so order yours now!

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!

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True Story

New Releases: Wedded Bliss (?), Hong Kong, and Why the Contessa

HELLO happy February, it’s starting to get lighter out, so that is a joy and a treasure. Lots of good releases this week, so let’s get to it:

Foreverland Cover

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky

Sure, marriage can be hard, and sometimes boring, but maybe the boring is good? Ask Polly advice columnist Havrilesky writes about the ups and downs of her own fifteen year marriage, illustrating “what a tedious, glorious drag forever can be.” Havrilesky wrote a piece for this book that was in the NYT, and it definitely made me want to pick this up.

The Impossible City cover

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung

Called one of the most anticipated books of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, this is “a rare insider’s view” of Hong Kong from someone who grew up there. Cheung was born just prior to Hong Kong being “handed over” from the UK to China. She tells of her “yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests” and delves into its musical and artistic life, sharing what it means to be a part of this complicated city.

Black American Refugee cover

Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream by Tiffanie Drayton

Drayton and her siblings moved to New Jersey in the early 1990s to join her mother. They were coming from Trinidad and Tobago. She soon started asking questions about the racial dynamics of the US — “Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all?” At age twenty, she moved back to Tobago, and absorbs the news from America, particularly concerning Black Americans, with the keen eye of someone outside the maelstrom.

The Color of Abolition cover

The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation by Linda Hirshman

I love this trend of telling the stories of multiple figures and how their work combined. William Lloyd Garrison and certainly Frederick Douglass are more known, but Maria Weston Chapman, aka “the Contessa,” has not stuck as strongly to the pages of history. These three all worked for abolition from the 1830s to 1860s. If you’re wondering about the Contessa nickname, no worries, I did a deep dive on Google. It looks like she was nicknamed that by American author Edmund Quincy, who liked to dole out nicknames. Anyway! This looks interesting.

Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!

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.

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True Story

What Do We Lose if We Ban Maus?

Hello and happiest of Fridays, nonfiction friends! For this week’s newsletter, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into a story that’s been in the news for the last couple of weeks. 

Last week, we learned that a school board in Tennessee has banned the graphic novel Maus from their eighth grade curriculum on the Holocaust. 

book cover maus by art spiegelman

Art Spiegelman’s book “tells the story of his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor, and it depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.” Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and is widely regarded as both a classic graphic novel and stellar example of creative nonfiction. It faced objections in McGinn County because it contains eight curse words and the image of a nude woman… but a mouse? It’s nonsensical.

If you want a recap of the discussion, Mother Jones reviewed the school board’s meeting minutes and it’s just… so bad. Discussions of book banning are, sadly, not new around here, but this one feels particularly troubling. Here are a few of the other pieces I’ve found useful in wrapping my head around why: 

  • On Twitter, author Gwen Katz had a great thread on the use of literature in classrooms, and why it’s damaging to replace challenging texts like Maus with those that seem more palatable. 
  • In Slate, author and scholar Emily Knox talks about some of the larger issues that come up when we talk about book banning, and how book bans impact the intended audience of the work in question.
  • NPR looked at how the ban is increasing sales of the book… but again, probably not to the readers who most need to see it. 
  • In The Atlantic, Marilisa Jiménez García writes about the impact of denying students accurate and unsanitized information about the past.

If you’ll permit me a related hot take based on my experience working at a local newspaper… this is the reason it’s so important to pay attention to your local government. While it’s tempting to buy and donate copies of banned books, what we really need to do is stop them from being banned in the first place. A way to do that is through attention.

If you have a local news organization and you can afford it, subscribe so you can support their work and keep up with what’s going on in your community. If you don’t have that option, find out when your school board meets and how you can review meeting agendas and minutes. Pay attention to their meeting topics, and if you see something you don’t agree with, send a letter or attend a meeting and make your voice heard. Your voice matters and can make a difference.

Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!

One Thing I Like

book cover kingdom of characters by jing tsu

This week, I want to recommend a new history book that came out in January – Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu. Today China is a global superpower, but that outcome wasn’t inevitable. One of the biggest challenges over the last century was about language – what did it take to make the Chinese language accessible to the modern world?

To explore that topic, Tsu uses the stories of individuals and groups who took on various aspects of standardizing both written and spoken Chinese, then adapting it to technologies like typewriters, the telegraph, and computers, which were explicitly built around the Roman alphabet. It’s a really interesting story if you’re a language nerd, and an accessible history of China over the last 100 years. And as a bonus, if you’re a Read Harder 2022 participant, it seems pretty likely you could count this one for task 22, history about a period you know little about. Enjoy! 

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

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! 

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True Story

New Releases: Whitney Houston, King Tut, and TB

We did it. We made it through January. What a terrible month. January has decided to round things out in Chicago by having a constant drip on my bedroom air conditioner, DESPITE it being 20 degrees out, meaning the drip has solidified into a solid sheet of ice. Winter: so fun.

However, I am happy to talk about the facts and opinions that are being published this week in the world of nonfiction. You might think there’s a publishing lull in January/February, but there is not! So many things are coming out now, in particular this year. So scan those bookstore new release shelves, and definitely check out the below:

Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them cover

Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them by Maeve Higgins

Irish comedian Higgins, author of Maeve in America, writes about the Alamo, monuments, Tom Hardy, Paper Source, “love for the glamorous older women of Brighton Beach with tattooed eyeliner and gold jewelry, love for everybody on this train.” I am very in the mood for this sort of book, so I am delighted this is out with its extremely fun cover.

Phantom Plague cover

The Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History by Vidya Krishnan

The publisher calls it the “definitive social history of tuberculosis.” Krishnan looks at the slums of nineteenth century New York to current-day Mumbai and how, while tuberculosis has been seen as a disease of the past, “the cure was never available to black and brown nations.” I love social histories, I love when investigative journalists really INVESTIGATE something, and Krishnan does that here.

Treasured cover

Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century by Christina Riggs

Did you know the first modern Egyptian revolution was in 1919, leading to the United Kingdom’s recognition of Egyptian independence in 1922? And that King Tutankhamun was excavated IN 1922! British archaeologist Howard Carter received the Order of the Nile, third class, from King Fuad I of Egypt. Fascinating. Anyway, this is a history of King Tut and his tomb from the last century. Super cool.

Didn't We Almost Have It All cover

Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston by Gerrick Kennedy

I LOVE WHITNEY HOUSTON. What an amazing singer. This explores “Whitney’s life as both a woman in the spotlight and someone who often had to hide who she was.” I can’t believe this month will be a decade since she died (she was 48). Let’s all read this bio and listen to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” And then we can watch the Brandy Cinderella since Brandy also contributed the foreword to this book.

Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!

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.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

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True Story

There’s a New David Sedaris Book Coming!

Happy almost weekend, nonfiction friends! It has been bitterly cold in Minnesota this week, which makes sense because it’s January but it’s also terrible anyway. I’ve had to just keep reminding myself that at least we don’t have giant snakes or hurricanes… but whew, it is not pleasant out there right now! 

But let’s not dwell on that and instead jump into nonfiction news for the week:

cover of A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is the winner of the American Library Association’s 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in nonfiction! His book about Black performance, A Little Devil in America, explores “the many iterations of Black artistic expression through an often deeply personal lens.” This one is on my list!

The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. On the nonfiction side, there are six finalists each for autobiography, criticism, and general nonfiction. The winners will be announced in a virtual ceremony on March 17.

Buddhist monk, activist, and author Thích Nhất Hạnh passed away at the age of 95. In addition to his many other roles, he was the author of more than 130 books, many on mindfulness, meditation, ecology, and more. He was an advocate for the idea of engaged Buddhism, which “encourages an individual’s role in creating change.”

book cover happy-go-lucky by david sedaris

David Sedaris has a new essay collection coming out in 2022! After his last two books moved to slightly different formats, a diary and a best-of collection, Happy-Go-Lucky is a return to personal essays. The newly-revealed cover really creeps me out, but I do think a Sedaris essay collection will be a bright spot later this year.

Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!

One Thing I Like

I’ve gotten VERY into this season of The Amazing Race. I don’t watch a ton of reality TV (aside from Dancing with the Stars #sorrynotsorry), but I recognized one of the competing pairs from the internet and so decided to watch. I’m not sure if it’s wanderlust, January blues, or late-pandemic brain, but I’m definitely in it for this season.

I was hoping there would be some books by former participants or something to recommend, but the best I’ve been able to find so far is this oral history of the first season by Andy Dehnart. If anyone has other materials to recommend, I’d love to hear!

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

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!

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True Story

New Releases: Octavia Butler, The Bachelorette, and American Utopias

We’ve almost made it. January is almost over. Congratulations to all, this month is one of the least good of all the months, and its death is nigh. But! I hope if you live in colder climes, you have found time to sit under a blanket and read, and if you are in warmer climes, that you have been able to sit outside and read, you lucky person.

Let’s look at some of these excellent new books:

Star Child by Ibi Zoboi cover

Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler by Ibi Zoboi

National Book Award-finalist Zoboi offers a middle grade biography of Octavia Butler! Something I love about the looser forms of middle grade and YA nonfiction is they can do something like this combination of prose and poetry to describe the life of this amazing sci-fi writer. Also “A Biographical Constellation” sounds so cool.

heaven is a place on earth cover

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Shirk pairs her quest to create a more communal way of living with a history of American utopian experiments, which as a premise, I LOVE. American utopias were so weird! As are basically all utopias! Does the description mention “the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain”? It does! And it is a “a two hundred-acre faerie sanctuary/safe queer space in central Tennessee.” Amazing.

miss me with that cover

Miss Me with That: Hot Takes, Helpful Tidbits, and a Few Hard Truths by Rachel Lindsay

The first Black lead on Bachelorette has a book and it looks excellent. Lindsay has taken a step back from the show recently, especially in light of things like former host Chris Harrison defending a contestant attending a plantation-themed fraternity party. She talks about growing up the daughter of a judge in Texas, why she chose to go on the show, and “the lack of diversity in reality television and the importance of political engagement, protest, and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

go back to where you came from cover

Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American by Wajahat Ali

I am 100% including this because the title made me laugh. Ali writes about the transition of America’s bogeyman from communism to Muslims, post-9/11, and how that impacted him, someone who grew up in Fremont, California with Pakistani parents. He also talks about “the dangers of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and chocolate hummus.” I am INTERESTED.

South to America by Imani Perry cover

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perri

This has been on All the Lists for anticipated 2022 books, so I probably don’t even need to cite it, but some people don’t read those lists! So this is for you. Perry shares stories from “immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences.” Perry is a Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and generally awesome. Her biography of Lorraine Hansberry won the PEN award for biography and was generally critically lauded.

Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!

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.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

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True Story

A New Nonfiction genre, New Books, A Con Story, Who Betrayed Anne Frank, and More

Hello nonfiction friends! The weekend is almost here, but before we go riding off into the sunset (aka stumble home and into sweatpants) I have some nonfiction news to share. This week includes a trailer for a great con story, a cold case with significant historical implications, thoughts on a new nonfiction genre, and more. Let’s dive in!

There’s a new trailer for a limited series about the “Soho Grifter.” Inventing Anna is coming to Netflix February 11, and tells a fictionalized story about Anna Delvey, a woman “convicted of scamming hotels, restaurants, banks, and friends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The show was created and co-written by Shonda Rhimes (amazing) and is based on a 2018 article from The Cut by Jessica Pressler. Delvey is also the subject of a great nonfiction book, My Friend Anna by Rachel DeLoache Williams. I love a good con story, real or fictionalized. 

book cover the betrayal of anne frank by rosemary sullivan

A new book claims to reveal who betrayed Anne Frank and her family. A cold case team led by a former FBI agent has been investigating the incident for six years. Their search is the subject of a new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan. They contend Frank and her family were revealed to the Nazis by a Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, as a form of life insurance for his family.

Have you ever heard of a “messay”? I recommend this recent Book Riot post about this awesome (and unofficial) genre, the memoir-essay hybrid that embraces mess in theme, structure, or emotion. It’s fun to think of potential examples!

And finally, I missed sharing a few upcoming titles and book announcements from late last year: 

  • Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, is writing a memoir critical of Facebook for Little, Brown. This one should be fascinating.
  • Minnie Driver is releasing an essay collection called Managing Expectations which will come out in May. I have to believe this one will be a treat on audio.
  • Former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III sold a memoir, Surviving Washington, to Atria Books. In the book Griffin will write about his time with the Washington Football Team and the toxic culture behind the scenes. I’m very curious about this one.
  • And finally, National Book Award Winner Tiya Miles has sold another book! Harriet’s Mirror will deal the dual stories of Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and how their tensions “foreshadowed contemporary conflicts between white and Black feminists.” So good!

One Thing I Like

book cover four thousand weeks by oliver burkeman

One of my favorite books of 2021 was 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book is about time management, but not in the way you might think. Instead of suggesting ways to fit more tasks into the absurdly short time we have on Earth, Burkeman instead writes about learning the best ways to use the 4,000 weeks we actually have. It’s a lovely mix of science, philosophy, literature, and spirituality that absolutely made me think about my life and my work in a different way than I did before. 

Burkman was recently interviewed on the On Being podcast where he talks about plans, resolutions, and how to embrace “a new relationship with time, our technologies, and the power of limits.” I haven’t quite finished the whole interview, but it’s just so, so great, I have to recommend it. 

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!

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True Story

New Releases: Albania, Jazz, and South Carolina

Welcome to your nonfiction new releases for the week! Kim and I just did a 2022 nonfiction preview on For Real and it got me even more jazzed for some of the amazing books coming out this year. Get those TBR lists ready if they aren’t already, because we got new facts comin’ at you:

The Urge cover

The Urge: Our History of Addiction by Carl Erik Fisher

Columbia University professor Fisher writes a history of addiction, not only from a medical perspective, but incorporating literature, religion, philosophy and sociology. This was one of my 2022 picks on For Real because I’m real psyched about it. Addiction has been with us for practically our entire history as humans, so why not learn more about why it happens and how we talk about it. Just a heads up, Fisher started the book because of his experience as an alcoholic, so he also covers some of his story there.

free a child and a country at the end of history cover

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Ypi grew up in Albania in the early ’90s (a country with a very dramatic flag) and writes about her living through the collapse of the Soviet state in the 1991 revolution and how the emergence of the “free market” led to chaos. Now a voice for the left in the United Kingdom, here she “offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.”

Struggling to Learn cover

Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina by June Manning Thomas

Thomas was part of the first integrated class in her school in 1964 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and it was a traumatic experience. In her book, she looks at how desegregation happened in South Carolina from the 1950s to the ’60s. Despite rulings from the Supreme Court (including Brown v. Board of Education), all schools in South Carolina were not desegregated until the shockingly late year of 1970.

Antagonistic Cooperation cover

Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture by Robert G. O’Meally

Ok you jazz nerds, I have a book for you. The title comes from Ralph Ellison’s description of ensemble jazz improvisation. Columbia University professor (another one!) O’Meally demonstrates how this concept “runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.” O’Meally teaches Comparative Literature and has written about jazz for over three decades. Here he talks about Louis Armstrong, Toni Morrison, Duke Ellington, Basquiat, and more.

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.

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True Story

Books for Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Happiest of Fridays, nonfiction friends! Congrats on making it through another week, an accomplishment I do not take lightly given the state of the world we’re all living in right now.

This coming Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday recognizing the birthday of this noted civil rights leader. Although King was actually born on January 15, we’ve celebrated MLK Day on the third Monday of January since 1986. In recognition of that day, I want to share a few recent books on the life, family, and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

book cover three mothers by anna malaika tubbs

Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Many, many books have been written about the three men mentioned in the subtitle of this book, but very few have dug into the women who helped share them. In this book, Tubbs traces the parallel lives of Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin – women who lived through some of the greatest changes in our nation’s history. It’s also a celebration of Black motherhood, and all of the anxiety that comes with sending Black men into the world. I liked this one a lot!

book cover nine days by stephen kendrick and paul kendrick

Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick

Just weeks before the 1960 presidential election, King was arrested at a sit-in at a department store in Atlanta, leading to the first night King ever spent in jail. It was a harrowing moment, as the 31-year-old was transferred, at night, to a notorious state prison overseen by violent white guards. Over the next nine days, King’s imprisonment had an intense impact on the election… as well as galvanized three members of the Kennedy campaign to act, both to free King and help bring electoral victory.

book cover sword and the shield by peniel joseph

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. by Peniel E. Joseph

This dual biography explores the ways the philosophies of Malcolm X and King have been pitted against each other as opposites – self-defense vs. nonviolence or Black power vs. civil rights – and why that framing is wrong. Instead, he argues that although the two men had some differences, they spent much of their lives inspiring and pushing each other in the movement for civil rights. I love books that come at familiar topics in new ways, so this one sounds great.

Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!

One Thing I Like

I am newly-obsessed with crossword puzzles. I’m trying to spend less time on social media, but having a hard time staying off my phone in those little moments of waiting throughout the day. I signed up for the New York Times Crossword app and have been gleefully working through the puzzle archive. I am, admittedly, still doing them with autocheck on… but I’m getting better!

book cover thinking inside the box by adrienne raphel

My new fascination reminded me of a book from several years ago, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them by Adrienne Raphel. In the book, Raphel documents the history of the crossword puzzle, from the invention “practically by accident” in 1913 to contemporary puzzlers like those who compete in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. There’s some real nerdy stuff happening around here!

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! 

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True Story

New Releases: a persecuted schoolgirl, a disappearance in the Himalayas, and Asian pop culture

Has anyone else completely lost track of the year? I know mistaking the year tends to be common in January, but nevertheless. I remain very convinced that 2020 was last year and I do not want to accept that it is now two years ago. SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED.

You know how to avoid that kind of thought? Books! New books! Very exciting. I have been making a list of new books I want to buy so that I can save up Book Money and then go on a book-buying spree. Just part of the planned joy for 2022, because we need to plan out that emotion for our own good.

Courage by Freshta Tori Jan cover

Courage: My Story of Persecution by Freshta Tori Jan

Part of the middle grade “I, Witness” series, this entry covers Freshta Tori Jan, who was persecuted by the Taliban as a schoolgirl in Afghanistan, as her friends were murdered and her school was shut down. She immigrated to the United States where she now mentors youth and shares her story. This young woman is TWENTY years old. Goodness.

Lost in the valley of death cover

Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas by Harley Rustad

This is about the disappearance of an American backpacker in the Himalayas — more specifically, the Parvati Valley in northern India, which the Wiki entry describes in part as “the thick, coniferous forest gradually [that] makes way for patches of meadowland scattered with boulders.” Thank you, descriptive writer, I appreciate this. The backpacker was a man who worked at a tech startup and quit his job to go on a spiritual quest, I guess. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love, only he seems to not have found temporary romance with a man in Italy (is that what happens? I have not read that book), because this is about his disappearance.

Rise A Pop History cover

Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now by Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, Philip Wang

It is a graphic history of Asian Americans from the last three decades, i.e. the ’90s to the 2020s! BTS! The popularity of sushi! Crazy Rich Asians! It’s a “guided tour through the pop-cultural touchstones and sociopolitical shifts” of this specific timespan, and I think this looks like a total delight. It’s got graphics, charts, essays, what else do you NEED in a book? Probably nothing. Maybe a woman writer, but I’ll just wait for that in volume 2.

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.