The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Reviewer rating: 

5

Pros: 

Extraordinary adventures of a dysfunctional family

Cons: 

On the quiet, a very troubling memoir

Jeannette grew up as the second of four children to Rex and Mary Jane Walls, he a delusional alcoholic, she a self-centred chaos merchant. The story is written from deep within the perspective of the child who still loves and admires her parents and believes the tales they spin, but what it recounts is a catalogue of traumas.

The Tender Bar

Reviewer rating: 

5

Pros: 

The sense of place, the distillation (no pun intended) of tavern life into a boy's personal journey, the honesty

Cons: 

Some repetition, some omitted detail

If you've ever wondered why drinking in a public group is more enjoyable, or wondered where you felt safest growing up, or gave any thought at all to how you might have given yourself a clearer pathway to your future, J.R. Moehringer's heartfelt memoir will help. This wonderful book, bursting with the most honest, convivial view of tavern life since I read Pete Hamill, isn't just for fun, though. It carries an important message about belonging and about believing in whatever you need to in order to survive.

Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life

Reviewer rating: 

5

Pros: 

A brilliant biography of a prickly, difficult genius who died too young.

Cons: 

None.

Claire Tomalin is a cool and cautious biographer. Although Mansfield’s life is fraught with scandal and lies and intrigue, she downplays it all in elegant fashion, refusing to take sides in the many arguments and disasters in which Mansfield became entangled. I admired the even-handedness of Tomalin, but wondered whether Mansfield herself would have approved: she seemed to revel in the heightened tensions of the dramatic.

The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden

Reviewer rating: 

5

Pros: 

A perfect book for this time of year

Cons: 

There aren't any!

Twenty years ago or so, Katherine Swift was commuting weekly to Dublin, where she worked as Keeper of Rare Books at Trinity College. But her husband wasn’t happy with the arrangement – he missed her, and so he set out to tempt her home. Always knowing that she wanted above all to create a garden, he searched for the right project, and eventually found The Dower House at Morville in Shropshire, a National Trust property offered for lease to applicants for a period of twenty years at a time.

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life

Reviewer rating: 

4

Pros: 

What it's really like to live from writing - beautifully written, if disturbing, memoir pieces.

Cons: 

You can tell these were once newspaper articles, and more work on cohering them into a narrative would have been nice.

When I began Michael Greenberg’s memoir, Beg, Borrow, Steal billed as a ‘wry and vivid take on life as a writer trying to practise his craft and simply stay afloat’ I felt initially a little short-changed. This isn’t a coherent memoir as such, but a collection of pieces written as a regular column for the Times Literary Supplement. And it doesn’t read much like the life of a writer, either.

Reading Women

Reviewer rating: 

4

Pros: 

This is a highly informative book that manages to be moving and engrossing at the same time. You get a wonderful memoir and the impression of having attended literature classes at Barnard.

Cons: 

You've got to have some interest in women's self-development, and some interest in reading about books, too, to really get the most out of it.

Stephanie Staal was born in the 70s, came of age in the 80s and graduated from Barnard and its feminism 101 classes with the belief that the world was at her feet. That’s what they taught girls in those heady post-second-wave days. I know, because I was one of them, too. We all graduated knowing that we had meaningful working lives ahead of us, that our freedom had been won for us by a generation of determined, intelligent women who’d fought for equality and that we could now repay their struggles by crashing through the glass ceiling.

Bird Cloud: A Memoir

Reviewer rating: 

2

Pros: 

Annie Proulx

Cons: 

Annie Proulx

I've been reading the author's short stories since the 1980s and have always had a great deal of respect for the no-nonsense way she writes, the incorporation of the setting as a character in the story, and the revealing way she displays the quirks and beauty of life in human interaction.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 (Mark Twain Papers)

Reviewer rating: 

4

Pros: 

Covers a huge range of subjects, with especially choice commentary reserved for the publishing industry and the Congress. The heft of the book will give you added upper body strength, too.

Cons: 

Covers a huge range of subjects...with all the footnotes and editors commentary you could ever want to read.

This is brilliant on so many levels, once you've peeled back the 3/4 of an inch of foreward, editorial footnotes and authenticating, scholarly gobbledygook,  it's hard to narrow it down. It's hard to lay down, too, but your arms wiill cry out in relief once you do.

Somewhere Towards the End

Reviewer rating: 

3

Pros: 

Overlayed with subtle humour and a sentiment which is searingly honest.

Cons: 

Uncomfortable to read at times and encourages the reader to consider death in a light devoid of sentiment.

I’m not one for watching television but it was on the other night and despite myself I was pulled into the night’s offering. It was a documentary about the author of this little memoir, Diana Athill.