I heard about Before the Coffee Gets Cold on the book blog Modern Mrs. Darcy. My tastes don't always align with the blogger's (thank God, or the site would utterly explode my TBR!), but in a way that makes the blog more useful to me, because I hear about books that would otherwise remain outside my bailiwick.
A Gentleman in Moscow is fiction. (I nearly went on, but on second thought I'll save those further comments for next week's Wednesday Reading Meme.)
The funny thing is that I LOVE memoirs, provided that I'm expecting the book to be a memoir. You'd think that would make me more forgiving when excess memoir crops up in nonfiction that is supposedly about North Korean film history or whatever, but in fact no. Of course, if you pick up a memoir, you have control over what type it is: if you pick up a divorce memoir, you know what you're getting into, it's not going to blindside you like picking up that North Korean film history book and, oh, okay, I guess we're going to talk about the author's failing marriage for ten pages now...
Also, writing about oneself actually seems to be a tricky skill. You'd think it would be a piece of cake - the definition of writing what you know! - but people are often so close to the topic, they don't seem to realize that readers will not find the author's failing marriage intrinsically interesting.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 07:30 pm (UTC)A Gentleman in Moscow is fiction. (I nearly went on, but on second thought I'll save those further comments for next week's Wednesday Reading Meme.)
The funny thing is that I LOVE memoirs, provided that I'm expecting the book to be a memoir. You'd think that would make me more forgiving when excess memoir crops up in nonfiction that is supposedly about North Korean film history or whatever, but in fact no. Of course, if you pick up a memoir, you have control over what type it is: if you pick up a divorce memoir, you know what you're getting into, it's not going to blindside you like picking up that North Korean film history book and, oh, okay, I guess we're going to talk about the author's failing marriage for ten pages now...
Also, writing about oneself actually seems to be a tricky skill. You'd think it would be a piece of cake - the definition of writing what you know! - but people are often so close to the topic, they don't seem to realize that readers will not find the author's failing marriage intrinsically interesting.