Digressive non-fiction with lots of musing on reading and writing

After devouring Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks I have re-awakened my hunger for a certain type of non-fiction.

The key elements in books of this sort for me are: intelligent clear prose, lots of digressions about reading and writing, often to do with solitude or the puzzle of writing 'true' history or biography, forays into psychology or philosophy and an author who often appears in the work or discusses its creation even if the work is not billed as memoir.

Here’s my list of all-time favourites in the un-genre.  

James Hamilton-Paterson: Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island.  I blogged about the book here, and although bits of it were not to my taste, the passages about living alone in the forest were so good that it earns its place on this list.

Alix Kates Shulman: Drinking the Rain. Frustratingly, I cannot find that I have ever blogged about this one, despite having read it twice during the lifetime of this blog.  I love the account of the author leaving her life in New York to go live alone in a cabin on a beach on an island off the Maine coast.  It is self sufficiency and nature with a dash of divorce and re-discovery of self thrown in. Her subsequent book To Love What Is is also excellent, but very different in subject matter, dealing with the enormous changes to her life when her (new) husband suffers a fall and is left brain damaged with little or no memory.

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn. Blogged about here, here and here.

Janet Malcolm: Reading Chekhov: a Critical Journey, In the Freud Archives and The Silent Woman. Respectively, a journey to visit some of the places Chekhov lived, a feud in the Freud society and the problems of writing biographies of Sylvia Plath while her literary estate was controlled by her former husband Ted Hughes.  I like Janet Malcolm a lot and see that she has a new book out Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial which I should track down.  The only one of her books I haven't got on with was Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice though even as I type that I feel the itch to give it another go. 

A J A Symons: The Quest for Corvo. I discovered this one, I think, through an essay by A S Byatt who contributes the foreword to this strange and delightfully unclassifiable volume.  I have the most vivid memory of reading it on a plane coming in to land at Venice, and the charm of the book and the wonder of Venice are inextricably linked.  It is one of those wonderful books in which an author describes the detective work, the coincidences, the patterns helping and thwarting him in the attempt to write the life of a strange and bizarre forgotten author.

Anne Fadiman: At Large and at Small and Ex Libris.  Two volumes of essays, the latter more literary than the first, but both delightful and delightfully written.

Diana Souhami Selkirk's Island.  Yes, we have a recurring desert island theme running through this post and here is the mother of all desert islands: the site of Selkirk's shipwreck that probably inspired Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe.  Diana Souhami is another reliably good writer of non-fiction and I have my eye on her Coconut Chaos: Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea  which I haven't read yet and which loosely concerns a trip to the island where some of the Bounty mutineers were abandoned.

I haven't yet read, but have high hopes for, Michael Holroyd's loose quasi-biographical trilogy of Basil Street Blues, Mosaic and A Book of Secrets.

I am also eagerly awaiting Rachel Cusk's divorce memoir.  I heard her read an excerpt (included in the Granta edition The F Word) and it was outstandingly good.

So, dear readers, can you add to the un-genre?  All suggestions avidly awaited.

Comments

[Dorothy W.]

Oh, good, some familiar things here, but a lot of new ones too. I'd put on my list, without a doubt, Nicholson Baker's U&I and Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage and Yoga for People .... Also Richard Holmes's Footsteps, Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust, George Saunders's The Braindead Megaphone (essays), Jenny Diski's Stranger on a Train, Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf's Nose (otherwise known as Body Parts), Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of. It's not bookish, but I really liked Deb Olin Unferth's memoir Revolution. Plus Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory. I think that's all I have right now.

[Litlove]

Thank you for this! I am trying, ahem, to write something in this sort of genre, and so need to read up on everything already published that's good. I would add Katie Roiphe's group biography, Uncommon Arrangements, and the book from which it is a sort of graft, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives. Now I'm going to print this list out.

[Litlove]

Oh and one other: Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting. Very good.

[Mrs Bookworld]

Thank you so much for these suggestions! Can't wait to get started and I will keep a beady eye on Tales from the Reading Room for news of progress on the digressive writing project.