A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All tagged memoir
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a poetic, organic coming-of-age novel about a Vietnamese American child, Little Dog. Vuong crafts the novel as a letter of sorts that Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother. It is intimately personal, written in first person, as it bounces from point to point in the narrative of his childhood and adolescence.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel that plays with various texts as it scaffolds a story across genre: a novel, two memoirs (although one reads more like an incomplete autobiography), and a diary. Broken into four sections authored by four different characters, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel constructs a layered tale about a New York City financial mogul and his wife during the 1920s and 30s.
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (2012) by Terry Tempest Williams is both moving and masterful in its craft. This just-over-two-hundred-page memoir is a small book that fits easily in a purse or a large pocket. It is one designed to be taken along when you leave the house. When Women Were Birds weaves Williams’s personal and family histories with that of the land on which she came of age. As any fan of Williams will expect, this slender volume includes many a powerful metaphor, startling anecdote, and compelling social-justice perspective.
