Heartland, Keith O’Brien
This brought me back to 1979, when as a child, I watched Larry Bird in the NCAA Championship game. Like many, this was the first time I saw him play, and he made me love the Boston Celtics that much more the following year when he began his NBA career. This book is a masterful sports biography that breathes new life into one of basketball's most unlikely Cinderella stories. O'Brien dives deep into the heart of small-town Indiana in the 1970s, chronicling Larry Bird's rocky pa
The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout
A meditation on the architecture of the self and the invisible shells surrounding human relationships. Through the life of Artie Dam, a beloved yet inwardly desolate high school history teacher in coastal MA, Strout probes the tension between our performed identities and the currents of loneliness that shape us. Artie moves through his days dispensing wisdom and kindness to students while wrestling with loneliness… a quiet despair amplified by a fractured world of political w
London Falling, P A Keefe
A nonfiction examination that goes beyond true crime to focus more on identity, deception, and the building of selfhood in a hyper-capitalist world. It’s centered around the 2019 death of nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from a luxury London apartment into the Thames. What begins as a family's grief-stricken search for answers unravels into revelations of Zac's double life: a middle-class teenager who inventively impersonated the scion of Russian oligarchic wealth, na
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol
I expect nothing less from Warhol… this is a weird little book that feels more like Andy just chatting with you over coffee than any kind of serious philosophy. He skips all the heavy academic stuff… no big theories or complicated arguments. Instead gives you these breezy, repetitive thoughts on everyday stuff like beauty, fame, money, time, and even death. What I loved is how he turns his whole pop art vibe into a way of seeing the world: everything’s about surfaces, not dig
Let It Blurt, Jim DeRogatis
It’s wild and messy. A biography that captures Lester Bangs like he was… brilliant, self-destructive, and totally unafraid to blurt out the raw truth. It's not your typical polished life story; instead, it dives into Bangs' chaotic world of rock criticism, drugs, and endless late-night rants, showing how he turned writing about music into a full-on philosophy of living. Bangs believed rock 'n' roll wasn't just entertainment; it was a gut-level attitude, a way to stay alive an
In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means To Be a Man, Tom Junod
Junod’s memoir blends intimate family memoir with journalistic investigation. A celebrated magazine writer known for profiles like his Esquire piece on Mr. Rogers, he turns his skills inward to reckon with his larger-than-life father, Lou----a WWII veteran, handbag salesman, and charismatic philanderer who embodied a midcentury ideal of swaggering masculinity reminiscent of Don Draper. The book excels in its sensory prose, emotional honesty, and revelations about family secre
You With The Sad Eyes, Christina Applegate
Her memoir that strips away the gloss of celebrity. Instead it reveals the raw, often grueling reality of her life. She directs the reader through the highs of her storied career and the lows of her health battles. The narrative serves as a vulnerable meditation on resilience and the complex process of mourning the person you used to be. Her voice is conversational yet brutally honest, making the reader feel like a confidant during her most private moments of struggle and sel
The Rest of Our Lives, Ben Markovits
The novel follows Tom Layward, a law professor in his fifties living in New York, whose wife Amy had an affair years earlier. He vowed to leave her once their youngest child left home, and when that moment finally arrives, he drives his daughter to college in Pittsburgh and simply keeps going west, embarking on an unplanned cross-country road trip that carries him through encounters with old friends, an ex-lover, his brother, and his son. It seemed to me to be a meditation on
Brawler, Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff's nine-story collection is upsetting, uneven, and veers off in unexpected directions. If the stories have a shared theme, it is how the bedrock of family crumbles and its members are forced to shift into new formations. They repeatedly return to the covert textures of women's inner lives. A throughline of feminism runs through the collection, from the title story about an unruly teen diver with a dying mother to quieter tales of young women navigating absent or e
How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
This book, written in the timeframe of the mid-1990s to 2001, is a testament to the power of preserving an independent inner life against the encroachment of modern distractions. Franzen’s prose offers honest personal reflections that bridge the gap between his private anxieties and broader cultural critiques. His ability to dissect the tension between artistic integrity and the commercial pressures of the literary world is done well, providing us with a thoughtful, often unc
