Changing my mind
A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade.Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.Split into four sections—"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays—some published here for the first time—on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers—E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others—have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences—in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond—that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind.
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What Hacker News says
- Zadie Smith's essays are tremendous. I highly recommend her earlier collection "Changing My Mind".
- Most recommended:
- Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others.
- Lawrence Weschler - Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A quality biography of Robert Irwin based on interviews over decades, and helps you learn to appreciate minimalist art to boot.
- Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
- Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions
- Burton G. Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah. Saw myself in several of these characters
- Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek
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Also good:
- Jack London - John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. Illustrates all of the interesting ways in which a person is tempted to drink: when someone else buys you one, when it's cold outside, ...
- Danny Bowien - The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook. Lots of stories between the recipes.
- David Byrne - How Music Works
- Meg Jay - The Defining Decade
- Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
- Magdalena Droste - Bauhaus 1919-1933
- Arimasa Osawa - Shinjuku Shark
- Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind
- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
- Haruki Murakami - The Strange Library. A fifteen minute read.
- Tim Ferriss - The Four-Hour Workweek. Good tactics for saving time; bad business advice.
- Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
- John Berger - Ways of Seeing
