Books shelved under “Memoirs”

Every so often there’s a topic that catches what I call my “background interest.” These are the topics that I enjoy reading about but don’t obsess over. North Korea is one such topic—I definitely want to keep reading and learning about the country, the regime, the people, but I’m pursuing it gradually. Five years ago I read In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park’s story of escaping North Korea. Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee –…

Like many Canadians, sometimes it feels like I know more about American politics than our own politics. American politics are louder, flashier, and take up more space in our news. So I’m trying my best to continue to monitor my country’s politics, particularly when it comes to issues of equity. That’s what drew me to Can You Hear Me Now?: I had heard of Celina Caesar-Chavannes and her rocky experience as a Black, female…

Ever since I was a child, space has captivated my imagination. I love space. I love space science. I love science fiction. I have literally spent months of my life by this point, I would estimate, with the crews of the various starships Enterprise, Voyager, and the station Deep Space Nine. Yet never have I really had much desire to go to space. It seems like a cold, forbidding place, and the…

My best friend Amanda recommended this to me a few years back, but if you don’t put a book in my hands when you recommend it, then good luck! Fortunately I was reminded of this book while looking for excerpts of travel writing to show to my Grade 11/12 English class last week. I was in the mood for some “adventure non-fiction” as one might call Into Thin Air. The library had an ebook…

Since I wrote this review, Knox has come out as nonbinary! I have updated their pronouns accordingly throughout, but please be aware that the review itself largely discusses Knox’s perspective as they share it when this book was written, i.e., as an ally rather than as a trans person themselves.

If I had read this book last year shortly after it came out, I would be writing this review from the position of a cisgender…

My boss, fittingly, gave me Bossypants! She gave it to me in June after I broke my elbow, and I promptly put it on my shelf and did not read it, like I do with most books. But now is the time! The time to read Tina Fey’s comedic memoir.

Let’s start with the obvious: Fey is a comedy genius. That isn’t in question. She is funny. This book is funny. If you like…

With the news coming out of the United States about abortion bans and lawmakers who actually use phrases like “consensual rape,” this seemed like the right time to read Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Also, I was going on a library run and it was available. Roxane Gay collects 30 essays about rape or rape culture, some previously published and others newly written for this book. This is a serious book, sure,…

It’s hard to describe or summarize this book. Educated is a memoir about growing up in rural Idaho to very religious parents who do not trust public education or the medical establishment. Westover’s father believes that the end of days will be on them soon, and he takes prepping to an extreme. Consequently, most of the family never goes to high school. As Westover watches some of her siblings leave home, either to college or…

Watching GamerGate unfold from the outside and listening to Zoë Quinn describe it in her own words are two very different things. Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate is more than a memoir; it’s a comprehensive dissection of a flawed facet of the Internet. I read it not just because I wanted to hear Quinn’s account of what happened but understand, from the…

When I taught in England, I wore a bow-tie every day to work, because I was not down with neckties. They are too long and floppy. While I was, in part, emulating the Eleventh Doctor, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give some credit for this sartorial preference to a much older role model: Bill Nye the Science Guy.

My favourite line of Everything All at Once comes in the very first chapter: “Thinking like…

I didn’t know how I felt after finishing Truth and Beauty, and to be honest, I still don’t know. This book made me feel a lot of complex and conflicting feelings. I guess that’s good? But I’m not sure I can articulate everything in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed.

A friend gave this to me as a kind of housewarming present after I tweeted that “I wish we talked more about friendship…

I was really looking forward to finally digging into Between the World and Me. It seemed like the perfect type of summer reading: intellectually stimulating, yet short; intense in its topics and writing, yet luxurious in its prose. Ta-Nehisi Coates' conscious emulation of the structure and style of early twentieth century writers like James Baldwin (whom, to be fair, I haven't read) makes for a nice departure from more prosaic non-fiction. Epistolary as it…

Buckle up and make sure you’re wearing your g-suit, because this is one of those rare books that live up to all the hype. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth comes with ridiculously high expectations: it has a bunch of awards, and everyone gives it such glowing reviews. So, naturally, I tempered my excitement. As anyone who has read my reviews knows, I love space and science fiction. I welcomed the opportunity to read…

Four years ago, I moved to England to begin my career as a teacher. Fresh out of Lakehead University's Faculty of Education, the dry job market in Ontario left me looking across the Atlantic. Thanks to Engage Education, an agency that specializes in recruiting teachers overseas for the English school system so desperately clamouring for them, I managed to land a classroom right away. When I moved back to Thunder Bay, I got on the…

A friend lent Decoded me after I expressed a desire to “get into hip hop”. This is not a whim on my part but a recognition of a gap in my otherwise wide musical listening. Although I would say that my “favourite” music tends towards a fairly narrow swath of sound, and my tastes are decidedly more pop than hard rock in later years, I appreciate a lot of different sounds, albeit perhaps not equally.…

I didn’t intend to read two non-fiction books, two books about economics, consecutively. That’s just how it happened. However, Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill, is about as far away as you might get from Trekonomics. The latter is speculating on what might or could be; the former is a deeply personal tale about politics and events that actually happened. Kevin Page, who shares a hometown of Thunder Bay with me, recounts…

Almost a year ago (has it been that long? gah) I read Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist. As you will know, I am a sucker for heist stories. That book led me to The Art of the Heist: Confessions of a Master Art Thief, Rock-and-Roller, and Prodigal Son. Myles Connor was (still is) a primary suspect in the Gardner heist, despite the fact he was…

In In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, Yeonmi Park simply and starkly relates her struggle, and the struggles of her family, to just survive under the brutal North Korean regime and in their subsequent escape to China. She does not sugarcoat or elide any part of her suffering—nor does she glorify it, use it as an excuse to discount or erase the suffering of others. Indeed, what strikes me…

After my pre-ordered copy of Furiously Happy arrived in the mail last week, I went looking for my copy of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. I wanted to tweet a photo of the two books together—Jenny Lawson now has a running theme of taxidermied animals on her book covers; I think she should stick with it. The copy of her first book was not on my bookshelf under “L.” I briefly pondered if I…

When I heard that Felicia Day had a book coming out, my knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) reaction was, “Isn’t she a little young to be writing memoirs?” The word connotes a sharing of memories as one surveys one’s entire life. A memoir, to mee, is something that people write at the end of their careers; Day doesn’t seem anywhere near the end of her career.

But I think that’s the whole point of You’re…