It’s time for another Summer Reading post! This is the last Summer Reading post of the year, and this week’s theme is nonfiction. Nonfiction isn’t something I read a lot of, but there are a few of them I have really enjoyed!

Here are my recommendations:

Dog Show by Billy Collins

Thoughts: Dog Show is a love letter to dogs, with lovely poems featuring man’s best friend! I really liked this book and read it in a day. The poems were so sweet, and there were some adorable artworks of dogs.

Review: 4 stars

Summary:

Billy Collins’s Dog Show celebrates the joy of our canine best friends, honoring the love we feel for these animals who play vital roles in so many of our lives. In twenty-five poems, Collins distills the many emotions dogs bring us, from the happiness we feel as we watch a dog trot out the door unencumbered by our burdens, to the silliness of holding a dog in our arms as we step on the scale together. Turning his inimitable eye and ear to the complexities of dog behavior, Collins ponders all that these winning creatures give us and what we learn from them about ourselves.

Three Wild Dogs (and the truth) by Markus Zusak

Thoughts: Three Wild Dogs is my all-time favorite nonfiction book, and I will read it at least once a year! This book is for all the dog lovers, and it tells what it is to be a dog owner. This book is honest about this experience, and Zusak brings his unique writing style to this wonderful book!

Review: 5 stars

Summary:

In this poignant, funny, and disarmingly honest memoir, one of the world’s most beloved storytellers, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book Thief, tells of his family’s adoption of three troublesome rescue dogs—a charming and courageous love story about making even the most incorrigible of animals family. There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us . . . It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things. What happens when the Zusak family opens their home to three big, wild, street-hardened dogs—Reuben, more wolf than hound; Archer, blond, beautiful, destructive; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm? The answer can only be chaos: There are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property damages, injuries, hospital visits, wellness checks, pure comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that must be read to be believed. There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love—and the joy and recognition of family. Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) is a tender, motley, and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder, a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty—but also the visceral truth of the natural world—straight to our doors and into our lives and change us forever.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Thoughts: When Breath Becomes Air is an interesting and realistic look at being terminally ill. It was incredibly moving, and the author did an incredible job of sharing his experience.

Review: 4 stars

Summary:

This memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both—now with an epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi.

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

Thoughts: Everything is Tuberculosis is a fantastic book all about the world’s deadliest disease. This was incredibly illuminating, and the author did a wonderful job of sharing so much about the history and current climate of this disease without overwhelming the reader.

Review: 4.5 stars

Summary:

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

Upstream by Mary Oliver

Thoughts: Mary Oliver is one of my all-time favorite poets, and Upstream is a lovely group of essays. These essays were interesting, and I love the way Oliver sees the world. Very cozy, and a lovely look at nature.

Review: 3.5 stars

Summary:

Comprising a selection of essays, Upstream finds beloved poet Mary Oliver reflecting on her astonishment and admiration for the natural world and the craft of writing.   As she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, finding solace and safety within the woods, and the joyful and rhythmic beating of wings, Oliver intimately shares with her readers her quiet discoveries, boundless curiosity, and exuberance for the grandeur of our world.  This radiant collection of her work, with some pieces published here for the first time, reaffirms Oliver as a passionate and prolific observer whose thoughtful meditations on spiders, writing a poem, blue fin tuna, and Ralph Waldo Emerson inspire us all to discover wonder and awe in life’s smallest corners.

Current Read: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Beginning Impression: This book is incredibly interesting, and Skloot is doing a phenomenal job of sharing this story. I am super excited to continue reading this book!

Reviews:

Book Review: Three Wild Dogs (and the truth)