What to Read: New Memoir for Autumn

AUTUMN IS WHEN THE SERIOUS books are published, and as much as I love a good summer read, I look forward to fall with the hunger of someone who has been living on sandwiches and now really needs a meal. Much like those movies that are considered Oscar-bait, books released late in the year are considered the real contenders for the big prizes, though how they will do in competition is of less concern to me than whether or not they are simply a good read. It looks like I’m in for a great season.

First off, there is a new ebook collection from Roger Rosenblatt, longtime essayist for Time magazine and the PBS Newshour. His recent Boy Detective (2013) made me smile from earring to earring, though it is the breadth of his work that has taught me much of what I need to know about my favorite genre. Combining his writing of the past six years into one collection, this ebook lets you take the ever-wonderful Roger Rosenblatt wherever you go.

Library Journal regularly reviews books, of course, and in a recent update brought several books into nightstand contender status. Of the four mentioned in a recent review, three sound like books I’d read or give as gifts, including The Call of the Farm by Rochelle Bilow, which is about answering a call by spending a year as a farm cook. In The Wild Truth, Carine McCandless provides the sister story to Into The Wild, giving her point of view on her brother’s infamous disappearance into the Alaska wilderness. And hard as it might seem to believe, I admit that I am more than a bit intrigued by Kate Shindle’s Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain, a cultural history of the Miss America Pageant. Years ago I had a student who was a contender for the crown, and her take on it greatly morphed my pure disdain into active curiosity. Ah story. It can do that, yes?

And as if that is not enough, it seems that Amy Poehler is advising women to “lean out,” in her new book, Yes, Please. By providing encouragement for women who do not aspire to that corner office, but who crave more artistic careers, she writes that you should “treat your career like a bad boyfriend,” and takes on that exhausted adage that following your bliss will lead you to the money. Ah, no, she says. Here is an interview with Amy Peohler on NPR. Listen up.

Library Journal is also my go-to spot for previews, and honestly, it felt I’d discovered the proverbial horn of plenty when reading their recent list of sixteen upcoming memoirs. Consider the bounty of a season that includes a new take on being a spinster, a memoir of love and loss from a Pulitzer finalist and 2009 presidential inaugural poet, the word according to the great Kate Mulgrew, and the number one bestselling book in France, which is a graphic memoir depicting a French family’s expatriation to Gafaffi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria. That, and so much more, awaits you when you look at this marvelous list of upcoming memoirs from Library Journal.

And you? What are you reading?