What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
Robert Darnton · 218 pages
"In The Case for Books, Robert Darnton offers an in-depth examination of the book from its earliest beginnings to its shifting role today in popular culture, commerce, and the academy. In a lasting collection drawn from previously published and new work alike, Robert Darnton lends unique authority to the life and role of the book in society. The resulting book is a wise work of scholarship - one t
Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books
Nick Hornby · 464 pages
Culling the best of his monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading" in The Believer magazine, the bestselling author presents hilarious observations on a vast array of topics, and provides a wide-ranging reader list that serves as a reminder as to why we read.
At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays
Anne Fadiman · 220 pages
Butterflies, ice-cream, writing at night, playing word games...in this witty, intimate and delicious book Anne Fadiman ruminates on her passions, both literary and everyday. From mourning the demise of letter-writing to revealing a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from Balzac's coffee addiction to making ice-cream from Liquid Nitrogen, she draws us into a world of hedonistic pleasures and literar
The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
Phyllis Rose · 271 pages
"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction,
Negotiating with the Dead
Margaret Atwood · 219 pages
What is the role of the Writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain--or excuse!--their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up
More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
Jen Campbell · 121 pages
"Illustrated by the Brothers McLeod, this collection includes peculiar queries and incidents from bookshops (and libraries!) around the world, and even a section of Weird Things Customers Say at Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops Book Signings."---Front flap.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages
Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.
One for the Books
Joe Queenan · 244 pages
One of America's leading humorists seriously examines his own obsession with books. Joe Queenan became a voracious reader as a means of escape from a joyless childhood in a Philadelphia housing project. In the years since then he has dedicated himself to an assortment of idiosyncratic reading challenges: spending a year reading only short books, spending a year reading books he always suspected he
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
A.J. Jacobs · 492 pages
Raised in a secular family but interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to stone adulterers. The
The Case of the Missing Books
Ian Sansom · 344 pages
Israel Armstrong is a passionate soul, lured to Ireland by the promise of an exciting new career. Alas, the job that awaits him is not quite what he had in mind. Still, Israel is not one to dwell on disappointment, as he prepares to drive a mobile library around a small, damp Irish town. After all, the scenery is lovely, the people are charming—but where are the books? The rolling library's 15,000
Upstream: Select Essays
Mary Oliver · 185 pages
"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mys
Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Anne Lamott · 240 pages
Anne Lamott gives her perspective on the art and work of writing. The title comes from a family story when her brother had to complete a report on birds. He put it off until the last minute and was overwhelmed. Her father counseled him saying they would take it, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen
Susannah Carson · 320 pages
For so many of us a Jane Austen novel is much more than the epitome of a great read. It is a delight and a solace, a challenge and a reward, and perhaps even an obsession. For two centuries Austen has enthralled readers. Few other authors can claim as many fans or as much devotion. So why are we so fascinated with her novels? What is it about her prose the has made Jane Austen so universally belov
The Eyre Affair
Jasper Fforde · 374 pages
The Eyre Affair Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Baconians are trying to convince the world that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare, there are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, and thousands of men are named John Milton, an homage to the real Milton
The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Neil Gaiman · 546 pages
"An enthralling collection of nonfiction essays on a myriad of topics--from art and artists to dreams, myths, and memories--observed in #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman's probing, amusing, and distinctive style. An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that inform
Classics for Pleasure
Michael Dirda · 346 pages
In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world's most entertaining books.
The Abortion
Richard Brautigan · 208 pages
A reclusive young man works in a San Francisco library for unpublishable books. Life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their manuscripts to the library, where they will be welcomed, registered and shelved. They will not be read, but they will be cherished. In comes Vida, with her manuscript. Her book is about her gorgeous body, in which she feels uncomfortable.
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
William Zinsser · 288 pages
In addition to exploring the techniques of nonfiction writing, Zinsser discusses sexism in writing, jargon, and psychological writing blocks.