I've been saying I don't read much nonfiction, and I still think that's probably comparatively true, but apparently I read more of it than I previously thought. In an effort to keep this list down to twelve, I imposed some arbitrary (not to say absurd) restrictions: nothing too textbookish (e.g. People's History of the United States), no reference books (e.g. Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets), no literary criticism (because, let's face it, if you want to read The Epistemology of the Closet you've probably already done it by now), and no biographies-although at least half of my choices could be categorized as memoir or autobiography. Like I said: arbitrary.
This book is a celebration of the female body-its anatomy, its chemistry, its evolution, and its laughter. - Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography
I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. - James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
I'm not sure I'd like to be one of the people featured on the New York Times wedding page, but I know I'd like to be the father of one of them. - David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
In 1989, not long after my partner Wally and I took the HIV test, the pain in my back-which had been a chronic, low-level problem-became acute. - Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast
It was a landmark event: we were having lunch. - Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
I grew up around a father and a mother who read every chance they got, who took us to the library every Thursday night to load up on books for the coming week. - Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death. - Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
Since I've returned from Russia a few weeks ago, I've been dreaming a lot. - Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, a ninth-century Moroccan city some five thousand kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous capitals of the Christians. - Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
Everybody else had a childhood, for one thing-where they were coaxed and coached and taught all the shorthand. - Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Dad died three days ago; we buried him this morning. - Rob Nixon, Dream Birds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune
We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. - Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell