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Diana Kimball's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Diana Kimball recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Diana Kimball's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Truth & Beauty

A Friendship

What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.

Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining...
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Recommended by Diana Kimball, and 1 others.

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2

H Is for Hawk

Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize, New York Times Bestseller, Named the Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015, #1 Bestseller in the UK, H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald. Magnificent, splendid memoirs woven with nature and a healing process of grief from the bereavement of her beloved father. In Korean. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc. less

Barack ObamaJust like us, the president enjoys a good beach read while relaxing in the sun. In 2016, he released his list of summer vacation books: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins Seveneves, Neal Stephenson The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (Source)

Nick PyensonH is for Hawk feels like the definitive statement on hawks for the modern times, and I think its success has a lot to do with how well Macdonald tied her inquiry into the life of a hawk with her own personal experience and journey. (Source)

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3

The Folded Clock

A Diary

Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, “The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor.”
     Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a fortysomething woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and...
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Recommended by Austin Kleon, Diana Kimball, and 2 others.

Austin KleonI’m not so sure that Julavitz and I would get along together at a party, but dang, I liked her book. (Source)

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4

Magic and Loss

The Internet as Art

Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the “best living writers of English prose”) reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet.

Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind’s great masterpieces—a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism. We all inhabit this fascinating place. But its deep logic, its cultural potential, and its societal impact often elude us. In this deep and...
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Recommended by Diana Kimball, and 1 others.

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5
In provocative detail with more than one hundred illustrations, critically acclaimed author Virginia Postrel separates glamour from glitz, revealing what qualities make a person, an object, a setting, or an experience glamorous.

What is it that creates that pleasurable pang of desire—the feeling of “if only”? If only I could wear those clothes, belong to that group, drive that car, live in that house, be (or be with) that person? Postrel identifies the three essential elements in all forms of glamour and explains how they work to create a distinctive sensation of projection and...
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Recommended by Diana Kimball, and 1 others.

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