Six Favorite Nonfiction and Memoir Reads of the Year

The Bossy Bookworm
4 days ago
7 min read

Six Nonfiction Reads

I love mixing nonfiction into my reading lists--and oh, the memoirs! I think I'll read anyone's story, as long as it's compelling and honest.

For more of my nonfiction reads and reviews, please check out this link.

If you like to read memoirs, you might like to check out some of my Bossy memoir reviews, or some of my Greedy Reading Lists of favorites:

If you've read any of these books, I'd love to hear what you think! What are some of your favorite nonfiction or memoir reads?

01 Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

Crosley's memoir traces a treasured friendship and the gutting loss of that dear friend. She's vulnerable enough to allow the reader in on her messy, sometimes fantastical, often poignant search for answers, meaning, and hope in the future.

In Sloane Crosley's memoir Grief Is for People, she explores life after the loss of her closest friend.

A month before that horrible loss, her New York City apartment is burgled, and at that time, all of her tenuous physical links to her past and family members--mixed though her emotions may be concerning some of them--are suddenly gone.

She obsesses over trying to track down the robber, can't let go of the fear that he might have targeted her specifically, and feels as though solving the mystery of who stole from her and why could resolve other, larger problems in her life.

Crosley mentally links the theft to the gutting death of her beloved friend, retracing the path of their friendship, her struggle to understand her friend's reasoning and unknown despair, and her deep, dark sense of loss.

I was intrigued by Crosley's mindset and the dark humor, devastating grief, and powerful memories she shares here.

I listened to Grief Is for People as an audiobook.

For my full review, check out Grief Is for People.

02 All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

Met Museum guard Bringley reflects on the decade he spent guarding priceless works of art, encountering a fascinating range of museumgoers, commiserating with his peers, reflecting on the works and his reactions to them, and searching for and finding peace after a terrible personal loss.

Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real. That's all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine or feel fully the things you already know.

Patrick Bringley, a former New Yorker staffer, after facing the tragic death of his beloved brother, spent ten years working as a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bringley offers glimpses into the sometimes-mundane, often intriguing behind-the-scenes processes and dynamics for the hundreds of employees who were and are daily surrounded by priceless works of art. His shared conversations with other guards illustrate a range of motivations for pursuing the work. But time, curiosity, emotional pain, and a desire to escape from it all added to his tendency to consider the intentions of artists, the stories behind the artwork, his own feelings about the works, and others' reactions, which he witnessed in real time.

Yet the heart of the book feels like it's Bringley's observations of the thousands of museumgoers who cross his path--the strangers who enter this magnificent museum, who wander and take it all in or search for specific works of art, who greedily rush or take hours to contemplate, who are awed or dismissive, who walk the galleries and encounter a vast array of expression in the artwork and who develop their own unique reactions to it all.

For my full review, please see All the Beauty in the World.

03 The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

This gorgeously written set of fifty-two love letters to nature encourage reflection and urge the reader to pause to honor even the less glamorous wonders of wilderness.

In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl offers a literary, nature-focused devotional of 52 chapters, each meditating on an element inspired by her close examination of the goings-on in her backyard.

Renkl's beautiful, striking observations range from a New Year's Day sighting of a crow and her exploration of crows' senses of community and cleverness, which she hopes set a tone for the year to come; to a grief-stricken examination of deadly fads such as the desire to have a vibrant green yard, free of weeds, and the widespread impacts of the poisonous chemicals required to achieve such a thing.

Renkl weaves in stories of her pivotal childhood encounters with nature, and for me the book really shone when she included her family's current shifts and changes in poignant passages she linked to her observations of nature. I adored this element--possibly because with a senior in high school, I am also facing enormous pending alterations to the makeup of our household.

I listened to The Comfort of Crows as an audiobook, but I think this one would have been even better read as a physical book for easier pausing and pondering.

For my full review, check out The Comfort of Crows.

04 What I Ate in One Year (and Related Thoughts) by Stanley Tucci

The gems of What I Ate in One Year are, as promised in the title, the food-related moments Stanley Tucci delves into over the course of a year--cooking, eating, appreciating, entertaining, and bringing together the people he loves around a table.

Cooking, eating, and appreciating delicious food is an essential part of Stanley Tucci's satisfaction, and in the nonfiction book What I Ate in One Year, he allows the food and wine that he prepares, eats, or enjoys (and, occasionally, pans) over the course of a year to add structure to the passage of 365 days, while interspersing some personal moments and brief mentions of professional pursuits.

The book is not particularly full of substance, but the moments that Tucci includes from his personal life help showcase the many atmospheric, cooking- and eating-focused entries, which are delightful.

Tucci is irresistibly playful, confident yet humble; mesmerized by excellent food prepared simply and served with style; and he is also occasionally curmudgeonly. He loves what he loves, and he especially loves his people and his Italian food.

I listened to What I Ate in One Year as an audiobook. It's a joy to listen to Stanley Tucci read his books in his wonderful voice. The only downside to taking in the book in this format was not being able to jot down the few recipes he mentions.

Stanley Tucci is also the author of the cookbooks The Tucci Table and The Tucci Cookbook, as well as the memoir Taste: My Life Through Food.

05 Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande writes clearly and poignantly about the search to achieve maximum well-being rather than prolonging diminished life at all costs--as well as the many complicating factors that make it difficult to transition to a focus on quality of life.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.

The past century of medical advancements have transformed some grave conditions from death sentences to manageable or curable illnesses.

But the focus on living longer and attempting to move past former limitations of medical solutions sometimes create a difficult dynamic: pursuing additional years of life at any cost sometimes means paying the price by experiencing a dramatically diminished quality of life.

In Being Mortal, surgeon, former Harvard professor, and public health leader (Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID) Atul Gawande explores the successes and failures of the medical field in prolonging a life worth living.

Being Mortal is a beautiful, poignant, clearheaded examination of the intersection of mortality, medicine, dreams, and reality. Gawande emphasizes asking key questions of loved ones to clearly understand their own particular, sometimes surprising lines in the sand regarding quality of life before they are unable to make key decisions for themselves: what are they willing to forgo in order to live?

If you're interested in books about mortality like I am, you might like the books on my Greedy Reading Lists Six Powerful Memoirs about Facing Mortality and Six More Powerful Books about Facing Mortality.

For my full review of this book, please see Being Mortal.

06 Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten

Ina's memoir is personal and thoughtful. Her charm comes through in candid reflections about her fascinating life, and her young life's adventures and missteps are as intriguing as the accounts of her eventual success.

Ina Garten, often called by the name of her former specialty food shop in the Hamptons (and television show), Barefoot Contessa, offers a personal, charming memoir in Be Ready When the Luck Happens.

Ina shares her life story, beginning with a difficult, abusive childhood, continuing to her marriage to Jeffrey while she was still in college, to her government job writing the nuclear energy budget and policy papers under President Ford and President Carter, then a flight of fancy that changed everything when she bought and learned to run the Hamptons store Barefoot Contessa--necessitating extended time apart from Jeffrey and, eventually, a very real scare that the relationship wouldn't survive.

I looked forward to getting back to this book each time I could, and I was as charmed by Ina's guileless storytelling as by her blend of delightful spontaneity, creativity, practicality, and stubbornness.

I listened to Be Ready When the Luck Happens as an audiobook.

Click here for my full review of Be Ready When the Luck Happens.