Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. This week, all the books appeared on one of the 2024 ‘best of’ lists.
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives
Summary: Five interrelated essays exploring identity, national fantasy, and history, drawing on everything from the author’s childhood obsession with My Little Pony and her notebooks from college, to Cold War musicals and the development of modern obstetrics.
I’m thinking: No.
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks
Summary: Many years ago, Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made people rich, but had long been in decline. Still, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home and years later, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman so he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and come her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.
I’m thinking: Yes.
All the Worst Humans by Phil Elwood
Summary: A bridge-burning memoir by a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the $129-billion industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media— a man who used to pull the strings, is now pulling back the curtain.
I’m thinking: No.
I’m thinking, Yes, for the James Rebanks book, too.
I started listening to the Rebanks novel last night. So far so good.
Will look forward to your thoughts!
The Place of Tides would work perfectly for the Islands category of the Nonfiction Reader Challenge
You’re enabling book buying 😀
OK, I’m putting The Place of Tides on my list, too. You might have seen that I read The Islandman this week, an early 20s book, memoire of a man who was born and grew up on the Blasket Islands of Ireland, now no longer occupied.