Although sheepshearing typically involves a bit of frustrated grunting from shearer and shearee alike, when done right, the act can resemble a ballet: two bodies bending and swooping in sync, the whirring of wickedly sharp clipper blades their only accompaniment. As readers will learn in Peggy Orenstein’s illuminating, informative and often funny Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater, doing that dance with any grace takes a lot of practice.
It all happened during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, when the journalist and bestselling author decided that, rather than baking bread or gardening, she would fill her “indefinitely empty calendar” with a dream project: making a sweater from the ground up. The lifelong knitter was taught the craft by her beloved late mother; it “bridged the generation gap, created reliably neutral ground where we could meet,” Orenstein writes.
Over the course of Orenstein’s quest, a talented group of teachers shared their expertise and passion for ranching, shearing, spinning, dyeing and knitting. Along the way, she explores how textile creation has influenced human history and culture, from language (gathering wool and counting sheep) to politics (yarn-bombing and pussy hats) to pivotal inventions. For example, the spinning wheel “has been credited with everything from establishing trade routes . . . to catalyzing the Renaissance.”
But progress had an eventual cost. Today, “the fashion industry is an ecological disaster, responsible for more greenhouse gases than all international flights and maritime shipping combined,” Orenstein writes. Indeed, concern for the Earth’s uncertain future is woven throughout Unraveling. So, too, is the inexorable passage of time, as the author considers the “amount of sand at the bottom of my personal hourglass” and the ways her personal identity has shifted and changed.
Orenstein is an impressively intrepid figure throughout this charming and candid memoir in essays—even when her goal requires her to wrestle recalcitrant sheep and pick bugs and poop out of fleece. She even fully embraces the fact that her goal requires her to do something many people avoid: allowing “ourselves, as adults, to be in a position of being absolute rank amateurs.” Perfectly imperfect like a handmade sweater, Unraveling is an entertaining chronicle of a challenging year wonderfully well spent. Creativity and craft can soothe anxiety, encourage connection and spark joy; Orenstein’s book will do the same.
Creativity and craft can soothe anxiety, encourage connection and spark joy; Peggy Orenstein’s book about learning to make a sweater from scratch will do the same.
I read the entirety of award-winning poet and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ masterwork, all 816 pages of it, on the tiny screen of my phone during a trip throughout Washington. I can’t think of any other epic book that would be worth that kind of reading experience, but The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is special. While driving across the state, I regularly came across attempts to recognize and honor the Indigenous peoples who once populated that land, gestures that I don’t often see in the South where I live. For this reason, the long gaze of Jeffers’ novel felt like the answer to a prayer. It tells the full history of an American family—whose heritage is African, Creek and Scottish—and their centurieslong connection to a bit of Georgia land, as revealed by the research of one descendant, Ailey. It made me wish that all American lands could have their chance to tell their full stories, all the way back to the beginning.
It is rare that a book simultaneously checks the boxes of timely, important, in-depth and narratively gripping. But the 640 pages of journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain walk the line between an impressively researched tome and a page-turning, propulsive story. Keefe’s 2021 tour de force recounts the full, damning tale of the Sackler family, spanning three generations of this American dynasty and their dealings at Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that produces the opioid pain pill OxyContin. The Sacklers worked hard to keep their name from being associated with OxyContin, and Empire of Pain makes it clear why—from their invention of the concept of marketing prescription drugs, to their tactic of offering regional sales reps monetary incentives for getting more doctors to prescribe more of their drugs, to their outright lies about how their product would not lead to addiction. It is a harrowing story of one family’s catastrophic contributions to the opioid crisis, masterfully told by a top-notch writer.
“You have fished in the waters of history and arranged some fractured pieces into a picture . . . but your determination to make it truth does not mean it is so,” declares Ead, one of the heroines of The Priory of the Orange Tree. Reading Samantha Shannon’s 848-page novel can feel like arranging fractured pieces into a complete picture, as it depicts the intersecting journeys of four narrators from different corners of an exquisitely detailed fantasy world. Ead, Tané, Niclays and Loth each have deeply held beliefs about the nature of good and evil, and a crisis that could annihilate humanity is bringing those beliefs into conflict. I will admit that I picked up the book for its Sapphic love story, and that’s a good reason to read it. The romance was tender and gorgeous, unfolding slowly enough to surprise me even though I was looking for it. However, when the casualties become devastating, what keeps you going is the thrill of connecting fragments of history and mythology from each storyline, knowing you will “see soon enough whose truth is correct.”
—Phoebe, Subscriptions
The Vanity Fair Diaries
There are many reasons that British journalist, writer and editor Tina Brown could land on one’s radar. She’s the founding editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, the first female editor of The New Yorker and the author of two bestselling books on the royal family. But the achievement that cemented Brown’s reputation was her miraculous turnaround of Vanity Fair. Resurrected by Condé Nast in 1983, the new VF was floundering, so the 30-year-old Brown quickly engaged talent like Dominick Dunne, Gail Sheehy and Helmut Newton, and wooed advertisers like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. Controversial stories grabbed headlines; so did provocative covers (who can forget the shot of a nude, pregnant Demi Moore?). Brown loves gossip and has a sharp wit, which means her behind-the-scenes stories of the 1980s NYC glitterati alone could carry 500 pages of memoir. But she’s also honest about the mistakes she’s made and the challenge of balancing a family and career. The Vanity Fair Diaries will leave you hoping Brown chronicled her time at the New Yorker too.
The American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal is awarded each year to “the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.” In 2008, it was won by this love letter to French inventor and film director George Mélies. To make a 544-page story short, it’s extraordinary, with 158 pencil drawings that will make you rethink everything you think you know about what picture books can be. The Invention of Hugo Cabret begins by inviting you to “picture yourself sitting in the darkness, like the beginning of a movie” and then captures your imagination via 21 wordless spreads. In many ways, Brian Selznick’s story is about small things that combine to form a creation greater than the sum of its parts, from a boy who lives in a train station and steals toys from the cantankerous owner of a toy booth to paragraphs filled with exquisitely yet economically observed details. Few picture books can be described as perfect, but this is one of them.
—Stephanie, Associate Editor
Correction, February 15, 2023: This article previously misspelled the name of Dominick Dunne.
February is the shortest month, but if you're looking for a long book to keep you company until March begins to roar, our editors have a few suggestions.
My friend writes a book. It’s a utopian work of speculative fiction, clever and imaginative and hopeful—a brilliant blend of art and activism. I bring flowers to her book launch and find a seat near the back of the cozy community garden where we’re gathered. Even before the reading starts, the space is abuzz with conversations about the worlds in her book and the limitations and radical possibilities of our current world. The evening feels magical. Fairy lights twinkle and apartment buildings tower above.
As the event planners set up the stage, I turn to the person sitting next to me—one of the few people I don’t know here—and introduce myself, excited to talk to someone new during the social scarcity of the COVID-19 pandemic. This person is easy to converse with: They tell me about their recent move to the city to start an MFA program and the angry activist nonfiction they write. I am intrigued; I love angry activist nonfiction. I promise to introduce them to some of my activist-writer friends, give them suggestions of bookstores to check out and places to write. I want to know so much more about the project they’re working on, and I’ve gotten through only a tenth of my questions when they say, “What about you, Lamya? You seem like a writer. What do you write?”
I freeze.
I, too, wrote a book. A memoir: a retelling of stories from the Quran as queer, brown, immigrant narratives, interspersed with stories from my queer, brown, immigrant life—a book I hope is both art and activism. But I don’t know how to answer my new friend’s question because I wrote under a pseudonym.
I wrote anonymously for many reasons, most of which are predictable and boring. Privacy. Safety. That I’m not out to my family. That my writing—in which I talk about God as nonbinary, the queerness of Musa’s (Moses’) miracles, Maryam (the Virgin Mary) as not liking men—could be considered controversial. That I’m complicating prophetic figures who are important in a lot of religions, writing about them as flawed, as making mistakes. I’m speculating about their sexualities, not for the sake of provocation but because these prophets feel like my friends—beautiful and messy and real—and their journeys have helped me figure out how to live. That it’s scary to anger people with power; it’s scary to be Googleable. That I want to write in complicated ways about Islam and still keep going to my mosque. That I want to write in complicated ways about the Islamophobia of queer communities and still be invited to potlucks and spoken word readings.
I wrote a book so open and honest that it was only possible for me to write under a pseudonym, but what I didn’t anticipate was the grief I would feel, even though I don’t regret my decision. Grief like in this moment at the book launch, unable to speak about my book with my new friend. Grief in a broader sense, too: the limitations my anonymity places on my ability to use the book as a starting point to create intentional spaces and communities. After opening night for a play called Coming Out Muslim 10 years ago, I joined a space created by the artists for queer Muslims to connect, which led me to find the chosen family and organizing community that I still participate in and am infinitely grateful for. My book won’t be able to do that for others in the same way.
“It’s scary to anger people with power; it’s scary to be Googleable.”
And there are smaller pangs of grief, too: the loss of specificity in my book when critiquing certain spaces for homophobia or racism, which inadvertently ends up protecting these spaces; not being able to share my book with the myriad folks who helped me learn how to write at writing retreats and workshops; not being able to thank my friends by name in the acknowledgments.
But my choice to write anonymously hasn’t stopped me from experiencing the joys of my book starting to go out into the world. A few weeks ago, someone whose name sounded familiar commented on my Instagram. It turns out she had written a beautiful essay some years ago that was foundational in teaching me to use stories and vignettes to talk about bigger concepts such as racism and homophobia, an essay that I had annotated and read over and over. I sent her an advanced copy of my book in gratitude, and it felt exciting to connect virtually, despite the anonymity. Another person emailed me about doing an event about racism against South Asians in the Arab country I grew up in, and they said I can present with my camera turned off, that her organization will do whatever needs to be done to protect my privacy. It’s a reminder that I don’t owe using my real name to anyone. I don’t owe my face being on the jacket cover. I’m allowed to write on my own terms. It’s possible to stay safe while still using my book as a tool for connection and conversation.
“What I didn’t anticipate was the grief I would feel, even though I don’t regret my decision.”
At my friend’s book launch, in the moment before I respond to my neighbor’s question about my own writing, I think of that joy, that sense of connection. I think about how I can selectively choose to invite people in, that my writing anonymously is also an act—however small—of wanting to make the world a better place. My new friend is waiting for my answer. I take a deep breath.
“I do write,” I say. “We should get coffee sometime. I’d love to tell you about my work.”
Headshot of Lamya H by Lia Clay for the Queer Art Community Portrait Project
Lamya H, the author of Hijab Butch Blues, reflects on what was gained and what was lost by writing her debut memoir under a pseudonym.
Michelle Obama will be the first to admit she is as fallible as anybody else, but she does have a lot of this life stuff figured out. The thoughtful way in which she presents her myriad experiences is what makes her second book, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (10 hours), such a gift. She opens up about the lessons she learned about parenting from her mother’s difficult childhood, what to look for in a husband, how to make fair compromises that build an enduring marriage and the challenges and rewards that come from raising kids to be strong individuals. She shares the difficulty of being the “only,” whether you’re the only person of your background at your college or the only person of your race to ever be first lady.
Listening to this audiobook, narrated by Obama, feels like a fulfillment of the classic “dream dinner guest” scenario. Obama is honest, forthcoming and wise, but also as familiar as a friend.
Journalists estimate that between 1 and 3 million Uyghur people are currently being held in detention camps by the Chinese government as an act of cultural genocide. That we in the U.S. know about this is largely due to the courageous reporting of Uyghur American journalists such as Gulchehra Hoja. In her stunning memoir, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival, Hoja recounts her childhood and education in East Turkestan, as well as her love for her family, language and culture, precious things that she has had to leave behind as an activist in exile in the U.S.
Located in the northwestern corner of mainland China, East Turkestan is the homeland of the primarily Muslim Uyghur, whose culture is rich with ancestral traditions in music and dance. Coming of age in an educated and musical family, Hoja trained as a dancer before turning to acting. She produced and hosted the first Uyghur language children’s TV show, gradually becoming aware of the increasing censorship and control the Chinese government exerted over both Uyghur people and the media. A trip to Europe in 2001, and a first glimpse of an uncensored internet, led Hoja to immigrate to the United States, where her journalistic skills quickly landed her a position at Radio Free Asia.
Hoja’s exile in the U.S. and persistence in reporting on the suppression of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government has resulted in grave consequences for her family back home. A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs dramatizes the violation of Uyghur human rights by grounding the political in the personal. Family and friendship are as much a part of Hoja’s story as the larger national and political context, reminding readers that every missing Uyghur is a person with a story of their own.
Uyghur American journalist Gulchehra Hoja’s stunning memoir recounts her love for her family and homeland, both of which she had to leave behind.
In what ways is writing like drumming? Like a drummer, the writer lays down a pattern of rhythm that keeps the plot of a story moving, propelling it with a steady beat through various twists and turns. Novelist Nic Brown’s peripatetic memoir, Bang Bang Crash, examines his past life as a drummer and the ways it both haunts and informs his current life as a writer.
When he was 8, Brown took drum lessons from a local jazz musician, and by the time Brown was in high school, he was playing in a few bands around the Greensboro, North Carolina, area. Although he was accepted at Princeton and Columbia, he deferred enrollment to keep gigging with his band, Athenaeum. They landed a record deal when Brown was 19 and even had a hit song. Brown spent much of 1996 touring the country, fulfilling all he’d ever wanted for his life—but by the end of the ’90s, he was losing his enthusiasm for music, and other dreams were starting to glitter on the horizon. One day, Brown picked up his acceptance letter from Columbia again and discovered he was still enrolled, even after his deferral over a year earlier. So he dropped his sticks, picked up his pen and left behind rock to start writing fiction, eventually landing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
After all these changes, Brown realized that writing offered a kind of artistic fulfillment that playing music had lacked. “As a drummer, I’d been yoked to the projects of others for so many years,” he writes, “that now, as a writer, I [was suddenly] so intoxicated by the opportunity to have an artistic project be all my own.” Even so, those old percussive impulses remain deep in his heart and soul. “I never play the drums anymore, but they never cease playing me,” he writes. “Rhythms and songs and patterns are dancing constantly through my mind, twirling in and around the beat of the windshield wipers, the thud of my footsteps, the click of my grocery cart as I wheel it away.”
Bang Bang Crash doesn’t always keep a steady beat, and sometimes it hits more rim than skin. Nevertheless, it offers a stylish portrait of a life in search of a deeper rhythm.
Novelist Nic Brown’s stylish memoir examines his past life as a drummer and the ways it both haunts and informs his current life as a writer.
Katherine May’s essay collection Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age offers similar meditative pleasures as her previous collection, Wintering—though you don’t need to have read Wintering to enjoy Enchantment. “When I want to describe how I feel right now, the word I reach for the most is discombobulated,” she writes, going on to chart the losses, burnout and anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of this era. “Time has looped and gathered, and I sometimes worry that I could skip through decades like this, standing in my bathroom, until I am suddenly old.”
In the opening essay, May describes feeling like she had lost some fundamental part of being alive, some elemental human feeling—like she had become disconnected from meaning. Without this missing piece, “the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life,” she writes. She began to wonder if she could find a solution in enchantment, which she defines as “small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.” So she set out to find and record such moments, beginning with the places where she found beauty as a child, such as the farmland outside her grandparents’ English village.
Enchantment’s essays are arranged into four sections—Earth, Water, Fire and Air—detailing May’s investigations into each realm. For example, a visit to an ancient healing well goes in the Water section. “There are steps down to a pool of dark water about a foot deep, the heart-shaped petals of the [briar] rose floating on its surface,” she writes about this hidden well. As in the book’s other essays, May doesn’t gloss over her feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy. “It has the air of a place that has waited patiently for a long time for someone to come along and worship, and now it has me standing awkwardly before it, at a loss. It crackles with magic, but I have no template for how to behave around it, no tradition or culture that prepared me for this.”
May details the small disappointments and larger surprises she encountered on her journey, and her sentences, plain yet gorgeous, cast a spell. The essay “Hierophany” opens simply, “Just after lunchtime when I was a child, my grandmother would sit down to eat an orange, and peace would fall over the house.” Enchantment mixes nature writing and bits of history, theology and literature with memoir—scenes from May’s childhood, her failures at meditation, ordinary marital discontents—to form a lucid, restful collection. Though May’s search for enchantment seems perhaps better suited to the English landscape, with its fairy tale-like ancient sites and villages, than to our American suburban sprawl, Enchantment offers a lovely, meditative way to begin another tumultuous year.
Wintering author Katherine May returns with Enchantment, a lovely, meditative ode to finding connection in a disconnected age.
Journalism professor Michelle Dowd was raised in California’s Angeles National Forest as part of an ultrareligious cult known as the Field, which was begun by her grandfather. She grew up fearing the apocalypse might arrive at any moment, and public education was shunned and largely avoided. “Outsiders” were never to be trusted. As Dowd writes in her excellent memoir, Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, her father taught his children that “preparing for war is an essential component of growing up.” He forced them to embrace discomfort, limited their food, weighed them after meals and sent them hiking in the snow in tennis shoes. Although there are numerous memoirs about growing up in religious cults, Dowd’s unique spin and reflective voice elevate her story.
Forager is reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, especially in the way that Dowd used her innate curiosity and thirst for education as a means to eventually break free. As a child, she began devouring the Bible—the only thing she had to read—taking secret notes on the many things she found puzzling or contradictory, “as if constructing a map for a prison escape.” Often she joined other cult members on long cross-country trips to raise money by performing in circuslike road shows. Dowd learned to endure her father’s frequent “rage and random violence” but never stopped yearning for her mother’s love and approval. Her mother was often absent, hugs weren’t allowed, and little if any nurturing was provided.
The one thing Dowd’s mother did provide was an exceptional naturalist’s education, which serves as the book’s framework. Since the apocalypse was believed to be imminent, Dowd and others were expertly trained in survival skills. Each chapter begins with an illustration and short discussion of a plant that might provide sustenance, such as chokeberry, yucca or Jeffrey pine. Dowd’s survival skills, which have long provided her with a life raft, both mentally and physically, are not only admirable but fascinating.
Although Forager chronicles a horrific upbringing, Dowd’s narration is ultimately hopeful, uplifting and always appreciative of our intimate, fragile dependence on our planet. As she so beautifully concludes, “The sustenance I rely on is from the Mountain, which has made my mind large, open, like the night sky, where there is room for paradox.”
Although there are numerous memoirs about growing up in religious cults, Michelle Dowd's reflective voice and unique connection to nature elevate her story.
“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “They have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” Perhaps this is why Sotheran’s, one of the oldest rare and antique bookstores in the world (“One year away from closing since 1761,” as the store’s running joke goes), seems like a dark forest full of adventure.
In Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller, satisfyingly named book dealer Oliver Darkshire extends an invitation into the shadowy and ever so slightly dangerous realm of this London bookshop. Health and safety hazards lurk around every turn. Towers of forgotten boxes rustle without prompting. Crumbling esoteric publications must be delivered to nameless agents on train platforms. As Darkshire portrays it in his humorous and hyperbolic memoir, bookselling is as far from a tame profession as you can get, more akin to joining MI6 or the CIA, or perhaps taking up professional snake handling.
Darkshire insists he simply stumbled into a career at Sotheran’s by responding to an advertisement after a series of failed attempts to land or hold down other jobs. His quirkiness, his adoration of history and his wide-eyed sense of wonder at the magic of books marked him as uniquely suited to the position (which largely entailed sitting behind a postage stamp-size desk by the door, as a first line of defense against customers). As Darkshire leads readers through the stacks, opening and closing various mysterious cupboards, we experience the thrill of being invited into his secret world. Peopled with taxidermied birds, a resident ghost and a band of frazzled booksellers, Sotheran’s constitutes its own small, puckish kingdom. Darkshire’s prose is so confiding in tone that the reader feels firmly included in this insular, bookish underworld.
For the devoted book hoarder and hunter, reading Once Upon a Tome is similar to the deliciously bewildering experience of wandering through a rare bookstore, not knowing what treasure might be just around the corner. Darkshire’s chapters are helpfully labeled with headings such as “Natural History” and “Modern First Editions”—but upon closer scrutiny, they are stuffed with stories that sometimes connect to the subject they are filed under only by the thinnest thread. In some books this would tangle the narrative into a volume of pure chaos, but through some kind of cheerful alchemy, it only adds to the magic of our journey through Sotheran’s. One is never in control in a bookstore; this is an indisputable fact long known by all book lovers. The sooner you surrender to the curious internal logic of this world of books, the sooner the magic begins.
In his memoir, Oliver Darkshire invites readers into one of the oldest antique bookstores in the world and acts as their hilarious, bookish guide.
Bozoma Saint John’s list of accomplishments is long. She has built a career as a marketing executive, most recently at Netflix, and filled her resume with hall of fame memberships and other accolades. You could be excused for wondering if her memoir is an executive’s story of professional success; this reviewer asked the same question. But no, The Urgent Life isn’t an executive’s guide to anything. It’s Saint John’s personal story of grief and survival.
In 1982, Saint John’s mother fled Ghana with her daughters. Their father was taken into political detention, and Saint John didn’t know when she would see him or their home country again. Her father rejoined the family in the United States months later, but from that point on, the young Saint John was familiar with loss. She later became acquainted with death after her grandmother’s passing, and more intimately so following the death of her college boyfriend.
When Saint John’s husband, Peter, received a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013, her perspective on loss quickly changed. The couple had been separated and in the process of divorcing, but in light of this development, they called it off. With limited time left together, they knew they wanted to live in the here and now. “We had to make haste, whether that meant moving back in together after being separated for years, booking a trip to our favorite getaway, or eating lasagna before it had time to cool,” she writes.
As Saint John vividly recounts the couple’s waning time together, she also reflects on the path that led them to each other. Their first meeting was acrimonious, but Peter quickly won over Saint John by reading her favorite book, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and taking her to dinner to discuss the novel. His insights impressed Saint John.
The couple fell fast after that, but the differences in their life experiences and upbringings—hers Ghanaian American, his Italian American—became difficult to sort through. Although Peter hadn’t previously been in a relationship with a Black woman, his 6-foot-5-inch, redheaded self fit into Black spaces with ease. He was content to watch Saint John and her friends dance at a club, nodding in time with music he didn’t otherwise listen to as he waited along the wall. She appreciated his comfort in her world while acknowledging that it was because of his whiteness that he was at ease. “There was no place that would deny him entry,” she writes.
The Urgent Life is an unflinching examination of Saint John’s experiences as a Black woman, the difficulties that almost ended her marriage and the love she and her husband clung to in his final days. Facing a life without Peter, Saint John made a decision to live urgently, recognizing that time spent with the people she loves isn’t guaranteed.
The Urgent Life is Bozoma Saint John’s personal story of the difficulties that almost ended her marriage and the love she and her husband clung to in his final days.
In Will Schwalbe’s memoir We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship, the wry writer of books-about-books (see The End of Your Life Book Club and Books for Living) turns his attention to an unexpected friendship that originated in a secret society at Yale. Unlike any secret society I’ve heard of, this one aimed at connecting very different folks in a purposeful community during their senior year of college. And members Schwalbe and Chris Maxey could hardly have been more different.
Early in the memoir, Schwalbe differentiates between nerds and jocks, positioning himself (theater kid, gay, literature major) in the former category and Maxey (wrestler, scuba diver, avid motorcyclist) in the latter. When the two met, they repelled each other like misaligned magnets; something about Maxey’s boisterous masculinity put Schwalbe on edge. But they began to listen to each other, due in part to the rituals of the society, and an unlikely trust began to form.
We Should Not Be Friends then veers from this nostalgic origin story into the rushing sweep of adulthood. Early dreams and uncertain beginnings gather momentum and fling the two friends through various adventures and, as time unfolds, into the stressful compression tunnel of middle age. Health concerns, financial concerns, marital concerns, dreams realized and abandoned, open communication and years of silence: All of it unfolds here, controlled through Schwalbe’s careful narration as he effectively shows how an fragile alliance in college yielded years of rewards.
As Schwalbe and Maxey share their lives, it’s obvious how much they support and even change each other, in part because of how different they are. “Had it not been for Maxey, the me that is here today wouldn’t be me,” Schwalbe writes, and he goes on to illustrate the peculiar familiarity that emerges between long-haul friends who have known each other across life stages, geographies and decades. If you are someone who appreciates the people in your life, especially those whose presence seems serendipitous, this book will feel at once fresh and familiar.
Will Schwalbe’s memoir captures the peculiar familiarity that emerges between long-haul friends who have known each other across life stages, geographies and decades.
In The Philosophy of Modern Song (6.5 hours), celebrated singer-songwriter Bob Dylan once again proves he’s a masterful storyteller. In these essays, Dylan provides rich, detailed commentary on 66 songs by other artists, including insight into the songwriting process and the backstories of the writers, musicians and performers involved. The audiobook is performed by Dylan, along with an all-star cast: Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright and Renée Zellweger. Numerous performers appear per chapter, each adding a unique resonance to the narrative with a powerful, lyrical effect. This is a gorgeous tribute to songs, their creators and the music of life itself.
Playing Under the Piano
While Hugh Bonneville’s musical interests mostly involved playing under a piano as a child, his performance in this entertaining memoir will be music to your ears. Blending animated self-deprecating humor, earnestness and charm, Bonneville recounts humbling experiences of being an actor, as well as tasty morsels of celebrity insights. Perhaps most famous for his roles as the Earl of Grantham on “Downton Abbey” and Paddington Bear’s hapless friend Henry Brown, Bonneville lends a spectrum of voices and tones to his stories, infusing them with warmth, tenderness or grand amusement. A witty and delightful listening experience, Playing Under the Piano: From Downton to Darkest Peru (10 hours) hits all the right notes.
In this collection of 40 essays, each titled after one of Bono’s songs and introduced by an audio clip, the singer-songwriter and humanitarian activist provides a sumptuous selection of stories that charts his journey from growing up in the tumultuous north side of Dublin in the 1970s, to becoming the frontman of the celebrated rock band U2. His Irish accented voice is gentle but has a bit of an edge, and he reveals a wisdom that can be traced back to his childhood spent listening to the music of David Bowie and Bob Dylan. Filled with enlightening details about the people and experiences that inspired him, Surrender (20.5 hours) is a candid, moving expression of how music can touch your life and make you realize what’s important.
This article has been updated to correct information regarding the songs Bob Dylan writes about in The Philosophy of Modern Song.
Music is “a thing with which to make memories,” writes Bob Dylan. These three memoirs each play to their own tunes that will, hopefully, spark a memory for you.
Oliver Darkshire’s debut memoir, Once Upon a Tome, gives readers a behind-the-scenes tour of one of the oldest bookstores in the world—including its (possibly) haunted bric-a-brac, resolutely old-fashioned booksellers and dangerously towering stacks. In this Behind the Book essay, Darkshire tells the surprisingly modern story of how his book came to be.
I never intended to write a book. I was, in fact, against it for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was an apprentice rare book dealer, and I had no wish to add “author” to my list of impoverished career choices. It rather felt like adding insult to preexisting injury. Secondly, I’d become accustomed to the strange ways of the shop and had developed a form of Stockholm syndrome in which the daily parade of peculiarities and cryptids seemed almost normal to me. I’d deluded myself into considering my life somewhat prosaic, even as I yelled at a 70-year-old man to get down from the top shelf at once and he threw (mercifully poorly aimed) almanacs in my general direction.
Lastly, and most importantly, if you get involved in the world of rare bookselling, you very quickly dive below the pristine, genteel surface into the dark underbelly. In the shadows of the collecting world, the habit cheerily referred to as “bibliomania” thrives in the damp and dark. Once one is lost to the urge of buying and collecting books, there really is no way back up the slippery slope to the daylight. It starts with a simple purchase of something nostalgic, and it ends when your body is found centuries later submerged in a tomblike ocean of first editions and literary ephemera. I often liken being in the business of antiquarian books to running a casino or dealing in illicit substances: You may sell to customers all you like, but you never sample the merchandise. My conscience could handle being involved in hawking books, as I could still muster some shred of denial as to the extent of my participation in organized crime, but the act of writing a book seemed like a step too far.
It was the Twitter account that started this whole mess, vanity being the sin that leads to all such downfalls. As a bookstore, Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street in London has kept a low profile since the late 20th century. It’s been through phases of popularity and desolation since 1761 when it was founded, but it was enjoying a few decades of peace and quiet when I ruined everything. Thinking myself very clever, and with the confidence of the young, I decided I might “help” by taking on some of the social media. I also thought it might be nice to have a place to vent about the odd things that happened at the shop—though I did have to move a stuffed owl out of the way so I had enough room on my desk to plug in a mobile phone among the stacks of reference books my colleagues assured me were vitally necessary, and which I never found reason to open.
It didn’t take long before a few stories that I leaked onto the internet—such as a thread about a singular and ill-fated visit from a Health and Safety inspector—threw the account into the public gaze, and it accelerated into the kind of popularity (or perhaps notoriety) an antiquarian bookseller dreads. Very soon my life was a frenzy of managing “likes,” which didn’t seem to mean anyone liked anything, “retweets,” which sounded like a hate crime, and direct messages, which were very confusing because Sotherans was still in the process of adjusting to the phenomenon of email (a dark art to be sure, but business is business). People would wander into the store asking for the person who “does the tweets,” and my quiet life was over. Pandora’s box was open, and it could not be closed again.
“It starts with a simple purchase of something nostalgic, and it ends when your body is found centuries later submerged in a tomblike ocean of first editions and literary ephemera.”
I don’t know if anyone in our musty old bookstore really knew what to make of our ever-increasing internet popularity. The notion of a “meme” was soundly ridiculed as inconsequential until I made a passing reference to my love of a tuna sandwich online, which took on a life of its own in the minds of our followers and eventually culminated in people sending us cans of tuna in the mail. My colleagues held the internet in the same esteem as a bucket of vipers: a situationally useful catalyst for change, if one is in particularly dire circumstances, but not something to be handled irresponsibly. As our following grew larger and more prominent, I found myself telling more and more of our tales and traditions to the wider public, who devoured them insatiably. A suspicious gourd? Tell us more, Oliver. A secret cellar in a forgotten basement? Give us pictures.
One day, as I brushed dust off a case to try and get a peek inside (I was hunting for a copy of “The Iliad,” which it eventually turned out had been sold years earlier), the phone trilled in the self-satisfied way it always does when it interrupts you in the middle of something important. Sighing, I picked up the wretched device to see that I had a message from someone claiming to be a literary agent. He thought Sotherans would make a great topic for a book. Now, I wasn’t born yesterday, so I accused him of being a fraud and went back to my book hunting, satisfied with a job well done. Alas, he proved quite persistent. More messages appeared. Would I be interested in lunch? This was the fatal blow, as I can be lured almost anywhere with the promise of a tuna sandwich.
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