![]() There's a wonderful essay about Tristram Shandy, the Laurence Sterne novel, in which he makes the point - I've never forgotten this. And he does essays about a wide - what used to be called personal essays, that we all read and had to write in high school. But this is - what I loved the most about this book are the essays. He does political cartoons for different newspapers. let's do the Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing. Gosh, this is like choosing my favorite daughter, which would be just impossible because it changes day to day. NANCY 2012 nonfiction: Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons. Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. And nonfiction: it's a tie! Robert Massie's Catherine The Great biography. The favorite for 2011: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. MARCIE And if you're from the Midwest, it's a double plus, because I believe this was set in Iowa. You just have to enjoy big character-driven novels. And I think that it's one of those books that you don't have to be a sports fan to really enjoy it. Harbach is editor of a small literary magazine, n + 1. ![]() I think we probably talked about it back in 2011. But this is a big, character-driven novel. I have to say, I am not as big a baseball fan as I am a football and basketball fan. But let's go with Robert.mmm, let's go with The Art of Fielding. Very hard to choose among these three books. ![]() Fiction: Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding. NANCY 2011 nonfiction: Erik Larson's I n the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, tied with Robert Massie's biography of Catherine the Great. Nonfiction: Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. My gosh, this just turned me into a Tatjana Soli fan. He was a photographer and she decides she's going to go and try to find him and photograph Vietnam during the war. It's a pretty amazing Vietnam novel about a woman whose brother has disappeared in Vietnam. NANCY I think it would be The Lotus Eaters. ![]() MARCIE Now picking your favorite child of those two. Fiction: Tatjana Soli's The Lotus Eaters. 2010 Nonfiction: Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. We're going to start at the beginning of the decade. MARCIE Well, as I mentioned, we don't have time to talk about everything that you did read, but we're going to run down the top picks for each year - and granted, some of them have more than a nonfiction and fiction category. And if you didn't like it, that's a good clue, if you understand your own reading. All you'd need to know is why someone would like this book. ![]() Which I think is important especially for a librarian, when you're recommending books. And so I have a lot of books that I know what they're about, and I can talk about them, but not with any enthusiasm. NANCY No, because, you know, I do not finish books that I'm not enjoying. MARCIE So it's sort of like one in 10 people writes a letter of complaint to public radio, one in 10 books you remember? What I'm trying to get at is are we talking about thousands of books? But I do so much public speaking about books to various organizations that I have records going back to, in some cases, the 1990s of what books I talked about at that presentation. ![]()
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