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No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays
“Greene is the best kind of guide: funny, probing, generous of mind and heart.”
―Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps―and remember: this is nonfiction.
Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation―on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look.
In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense―of anything, really―but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime. Each essay returns readers to our smallest moments and our largest ones in a book that makes us realize―through its exuberant language, its playful curation, and its delightful associative leapfrogging―that they are, in fact, one in the same.
―Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps―and remember: this is nonfiction.
Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation―on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look.
In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense―of anything, really―but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime. Each essay returns readers to our smallest moments and our largest ones in a book that makes us realize―through its exuberant language, its playful curation, and its delightful associative leapfrogging―that they are, in fact, one in the same.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published March 4, 2025
73 people are currently reading
5041 people want to read
About the author
A. Kendra Greene
6 books46 followersA. Kendra Greene vaccinated wild boars in Chile, taught English in Korea, and started her museum career adhering text to the wall one letter at a time. She has an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and is currently the Writer in Residence at the Dallas Museum of Art.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
September 30, 2025
“No Less Strange or Wonderful” is a collection of essays with the perfect title. The stories were quirky, weird, and overly specific at times. They were filled with fascinating sketches, diagrams, and an assortment of facts that I’m not sure I’d be utilizing in the future. I almost could feel the author’s passion and enthusiasm for each essay.
I started reading it in March, couldn’t get past the second stories, set it aside for a few months. I picked it up again in July, when the days were long and my mind was less overwhelmed with life demands. I was able to enjoy the book more.
Many thanks for the ARC I received in a Goodreads giveaway. Publication date: March 2025.
I started reading it in March, couldn’t get past the second stories, set it aside for a few months. I picked it up again in July, when the days were long and my mind was less overwhelmed with life demands. I was able to enjoy the book more.
Many thanks for the ARC I received in a Goodreads giveaway. Publication date: March 2025.
March 27, 2025
3.5/5
This is the kind of book I’d see someone on the train reading. I’d see the cover and title and think to myself that it sounds interesting. I’d think the person reading it must be smart and ponder what the book is about. All the while, the reader is simply just passing the time.
It’s that kind of book. The kind you’d stumble across and read on a slow day towards a destination. You unexpectedly enjoy it. It’s cozy, curious, and strangely beautiful. It’s neither too simple nor too complex.
This is the kind of book I’d see someone on the train reading. I’d see the cover and title and think to myself that it sounds interesting. I’d think the person reading it must be smart and ponder what the book is about. All the while, the reader is simply just passing the time.
It’s that kind of book. The kind you’d stumble across and read on a slow day towards a destination. You unexpectedly enjoy it. It’s cozy, curious, and strangely beautiful. It’s neither too simple nor too complex.
March 15, 2025
A little too quirky and meandering for my taste. The writing was beautiful and evocative and the illustrations were great. The essays didn’t work for me overall though, with the exception of a few really strong ones.
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dnf
August 9, 2025DNF at 27%
Just not for me in this moment in time
Just not for me in this moment in time
April 21, 2025
TITLE: No Less Strange or Wonderful
AUTHOR: A Kendra Greene
PUB DATE: 03.04.2025
Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps―and remember: this is nonfiction.
THOUGHTS:
I love whimsical books like this - such a brilliant and insightful collection of essays through author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s eyes as she sees the world and humanity.
No Less Strange or Wonderful is a collection of twenty-six essays that exude joy, wonder, the strange and the ordinary, and many more. Greene's words allowed me small moments of escape - i kept this book next to me and read with open mind - I laughed, I pondered, but most of all was moved by seeing the extraordinary in even the smallest moments.
AUTHOR: A Kendra Greene
PUB DATE: 03.04.2025
Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps―and remember: this is nonfiction.
THOUGHTS:
I love whimsical books like this - such a brilliant and insightful collection of essays through author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s eyes as she sees the world and humanity.
No Less Strange or Wonderful is a collection of twenty-six essays that exude joy, wonder, the strange and the ordinary, and many more. Greene's words allowed me small moments of escape - i kept this book next to me and read with open mind - I laughed, I pondered, but most of all was moved by seeing the extraordinary in even the smallest moments.
January 2, 2025
I can’t imagine a better title for this book, as each essay has elements of wonder or strangeness or both.
There are essays in this collection that are charming (“Love Is in the Airport”), bittersweet (“My Mother Greets the Inanimate”), sobering (“Sack of Gravel”) and laugh-out-loud delightful and enlightening (“Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps”). And, I’ll admit, there are some that are perplexing and I didn’t really get. And while “People Lie to Giraffe,” the last essay in the book, seemed a bit too long and for much of it I felt as if there was an inside joke I was missing, the essay ends on a note that makes it an entirely appropriate finale.
Author A. Kendra Greene, who by the looks of her biography already has a few lifetimes of experiences under her belt, offers a different, yet thoughtful lens on the world from mine, and I was on board for the challenge. Where else can you read about the how and why of plotting to kidnap a snowman? In Texas!
And where to start on all the magnificent illustrations? Greene is as talented an artist as she is an essayist. I received an ARC of this book — thank you to GoodReads and the publisher — and I hope this quirky collection of stories will find a wide audience.
There are essays in this collection that are charming (“Love Is in the Airport”), bittersweet (“My Mother Greets the Inanimate”), sobering (“Sack of Gravel”) and laugh-out-loud delightful and enlightening (“Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps”). And, I’ll admit, there are some that are perplexing and I didn’t really get. And while “People Lie to Giraffe,” the last essay in the book, seemed a bit too long and for much of it I felt as if there was an inside joke I was missing, the essay ends on a note that makes it an entirely appropriate finale.
Author A. Kendra Greene, who by the looks of her biography already has a few lifetimes of experiences under her belt, offers a different, yet thoughtful lens on the world from mine, and I was on board for the challenge. Where else can you read about the how and why of plotting to kidnap a snowman? In Texas!
And where to start on all the magnificent illustrations? Greene is as talented an artist as she is an essayist. I received an ARC of this book — thank you to GoodReads and the publisher — and I hope this quirky collection of stories will find a wide audience.
June 12, 2025
A pretty hit or miss essay collection. The ones that hit really worked for me, but unfortunately there were more misses.
April 9, 2025
I picked this up by impulse at Eliot Bay Books in Seattle, as a staff recommendation. The illustrations and the initial short essay convinced me that this would be a refreshing change of pace.
Part poetry, part short memoir, all interesting observations of life, this collection was a worthwhile palate cleanser.
Part poetry, part short memoir, all interesting observations of life, this collection was a worthwhile palate cleanser.
April 21, 2025
My review from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (April 13th): https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books...
Full text:
Knee-deep in an essay titled “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” A. Kendra Greene casually mentions the maxim “all models are wrong,” generally attributed to statistician George Box who used it in a 1976 paper and goes on to finish the line “but some are useful.”
This was a “truism” that I found myself returning to in Greene’s new book “No Less Strange or Wonderful,” a collection of essays which, among many other things, asks us to consider the nature of perspective in our daily lives.
Greene does this very early on in her essay “The Witching Hour” which seems less like your traditional idea of what an essay might be and instead closer to its Old French etymological roots, essai, which means something like: a trial or attempt.
I would push it back even further to its Proto-Indo-European root ag (which eventually finds its way into Latin as exigent): to drive, to draw out, to move. It is impossible not to be moved by Greene’s essays, all caught up in a miraculous kind of exigency, and this first brief series of paragraphs forces us to consider whether a tree might be able to ride a bike.
No word of a lie. I promise you this is (one of) the first questions you’ll have to ask yourself in reading this collection. And it’s this question of perspective (whose perspective, based on certain givens) that floats its way across the book like tangled seaweed.
Greene might have something to say about this metaphor, as she writes in her essay “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy,” “metaphors themselves can die, be dead, whether you were taught that happens when they become conventional…or whether you prefer the reading that a metaphor dies only when it falls out of use.”
I love the duality of these possibilities. It is either the continued use or the complete loss of something that brings it to ruin. In this way, Greene’s book reminds me of explaining irregular verbs to students in a History of the English Language class.
Generally, the complication lies in either a word used too much, or too little. Either way, it finds itself mired in a sort of strangeness. Like the verb “to be,” odd in its variable morphology depending on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, but only because we’re speaking contemporary English. If we were uttering its ancestor, this would all seem perfectly normal. It just never changed because we used the word too often to bother.
Greene has created a book in “No Less Strange or Wonderful” that is, ostensibly, a sort of museum of curiosities. Though, that’s only at first glance. Upon further inspection, the language isn’t caged or encased like a fossil, it’s conscious and considerate of each passing moment. This is a collection of truly great first lines like “Joanna was the perfect height to be a princess but she was employed as a chipmunk,” which doesn’t make very much sense unless you consider the perspective you have on all of these words, something beyond their syllabic weight, and then it feels like a perfectly straightforward thing to say.
In “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” Greene cites writer Nathan Heller’s observation that “there are two kinds of ideas: sunflowers and bougainvillea,” that the sunflower is a thing which is clear and hearty, but there is also the bougainvillea, which “resists being any one thing.”
Risking language that might either be overused or never used again at all, “No Less Strange or Wonderful” is a book that dresses itself as bougainvillea, feeling its way through the world, but is actually a sunflower, robust and towering.
Full text:
Knee-deep in an essay titled “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” A. Kendra Greene casually mentions the maxim “all models are wrong,” generally attributed to statistician George Box who used it in a 1976 paper and goes on to finish the line “but some are useful.”
This was a “truism” that I found myself returning to in Greene’s new book “No Less Strange or Wonderful,” a collection of essays which, among many other things, asks us to consider the nature of perspective in our daily lives.
Greene does this very early on in her essay “The Witching Hour” which seems less like your traditional idea of what an essay might be and instead closer to its Old French etymological roots, essai, which means something like: a trial or attempt.
I would push it back even further to its Proto-Indo-European root ag (which eventually finds its way into Latin as exigent): to drive, to draw out, to move. It is impossible not to be moved by Greene’s essays, all caught up in a miraculous kind of exigency, and this first brief series of paragraphs forces us to consider whether a tree might be able to ride a bike.
No word of a lie. I promise you this is (one of) the first questions you’ll have to ask yourself in reading this collection. And it’s this question of perspective (whose perspective, based on certain givens) that floats its way across the book like tangled seaweed.
Greene might have something to say about this metaphor, as she writes in her essay “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy,” “metaphors themselves can die, be dead, whether you were taught that happens when they become conventional…or whether you prefer the reading that a metaphor dies only when it falls out of use.”
I love the duality of these possibilities. It is either the continued use or the complete loss of something that brings it to ruin. In this way, Greene’s book reminds me of explaining irregular verbs to students in a History of the English Language class.
Generally, the complication lies in either a word used too much, or too little. Either way, it finds itself mired in a sort of strangeness. Like the verb “to be,” odd in its variable morphology depending on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, but only because we’re speaking contemporary English. If we were uttering its ancestor, this would all seem perfectly normal. It just never changed because we used the word too often to bother.
Greene has created a book in “No Less Strange or Wonderful” that is, ostensibly, a sort of museum of curiosities. Though, that’s only at first glance. Upon further inspection, the language isn’t caged or encased like a fossil, it’s conscious and considerate of each passing moment. This is a collection of truly great first lines like “Joanna was the perfect height to be a princess but she was employed as a chipmunk,” which doesn’t make very much sense unless you consider the perspective you have on all of these words, something beyond their syllabic weight, and then it feels like a perfectly straightforward thing to say.
In “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” Greene cites writer Nathan Heller’s observation that “there are two kinds of ideas: sunflowers and bougainvillea,” that the sunflower is a thing which is clear and hearty, but there is also the bougainvillea, which “resists being any one thing.”
Risking language that might either be overused or never used again at all, “No Less Strange or Wonderful” is a book that dresses itself as bougainvillea, feeling its way through the world, but is actually a sunflower, robust and towering.
May 16, 2025
This book is filled with whimsical, sometimes dream-like essays that read like a joyful philosophy book. Because each essay is different, I have favorites:
Until It Pops is a very serious and heartbreaking look at objectivity and sexual harassment hidden beneath an expose of balloon twisters.
Sack of Gravel is one of the most introspective looks into mammography and the emotions surrounding the checkups involved with getting them.
I Can Feel Your Human Fingers is a beautiful story about innocence and how the youngest among us are often immune to the bullshit that starts piling up as we get older and feel the need to complicate everything with some light fibbing (also looked into in the short story People Lie to Giraffe at the end of the book).
Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps is possibly the most true statement in the book, while the essay looks at metaphor and how sometimes it's the only way to humanize someone who has proven themselves to be in-human.
By Degrees documents life in Texas during the rolling blackouts and ice storm from 2021. My in-laws suffered through that, and it caused enough damage to their house that they lived in a hotel for a year afterward while their home was repaired.
My Mother Greets the Inanimate made me cry.
On Letting the Universe In is a story every cat lover will cherish.
What a great read this book is. I'm excited for whatever A. writes next.
Until It Pops is a very serious and heartbreaking look at objectivity and sexual harassment hidden beneath an expose of balloon twisters.
Sack of Gravel is one of the most introspective looks into mammography and the emotions surrounding the checkups involved with getting them.
I Can Feel Your Human Fingers is a beautiful story about innocence and how the youngest among us are often immune to the bullshit that starts piling up as we get older and feel the need to complicate everything with some light fibbing (also looked into in the short story People Lie to Giraffe at the end of the book).
Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps is possibly the most true statement in the book, while the essay looks at metaphor and how sometimes it's the only way to humanize someone who has proven themselves to be in-human.
By Degrees documents life in Texas during the rolling blackouts and ice storm from 2021. My in-laws suffered through that, and it caused enough damage to their house that they lived in a hotel for a year afterward while their home was repaired.
My Mother Greets the Inanimate made me cry.
On Letting the Universe In is a story every cat lover will cherish.
What a great read this book is. I'm excited for whatever A. writes next.
Read
April 9, 2025This book is beautiful - full of strange and wonderful things, and I was frequently dazzled. But I didn't finish it. I skipped over several essays, and was happy to be done when I was. Greene has a background in museum curation, which was interesting and the associated illustrations give the book an overall mysteriously intriguing quality - and I usually enjoy essays. These somehow felt a little bit too abstract, perhaps, because at times they were hard to follow. As a result of my own mixed feelings, I wasn't comfortable providing a star rating. I wasn't able to engage with it, as I hoped to, but that doesn't mean the book isn't good - it is very creative, thoughtful, and beautifully designed. If you don't read the book, do search for balloon dresses! A very real creation that will dazzle and intrigue you.
Read
March 1, 2025this was SO wonderful. and medium strange. Completely delightful essays that makes me want to read this author's entire body of work. Creative Nonfiction is so on don't listen to the naysayers. Also I think this book + THE MEMORY PALACE is a perfect duo as a gift for people who like fun facts/weird histories/quirky storytelling. E.g.overlapping target audience of anyone who listens to Ologies w/ Alie Ward. Which is to say nerds more or less after my own heart. <3
May 17, 2025
Let me say first that it is difficult to find a book of nonfiction essays that is 5 stars. Very difficult. The essays in this book that I loved—I loved a lot. The ones that I didn’t, I skipped over after testing the water. Do I regret reading the book? Not at all! There are essays I will go back to, because they’re great. Others I’ve already erased from my memory with no regrets. That’s the beauty of nonfiction essays. They’re often short. And you know pretty quickly if they’re in your own, personal, five-star category.
August 6, 2025
A little meandering and sometimes self-indulgent (looking at you, By Degrees), but indisputably charming. A. Kendra Greene knows where her strengths lie - a penchant for capturing ephemeral moments without ruining their magic, and a knack for balancing a sense of wonder with a sense of grief. To me, the strongest essays in the collection were the ones that adhered most closely to the theme.
July 26, 2025
I honestly did not read every single page of this book. I did not find the essays interesting but they also didn't really seem to have any point to them.
March 12, 2025
From my Substack (https://alvarozinosamaro.substack.com/):
Imagine chancing upon a museum of literary sculptures. Each one is sinewy, casting mysterious shadows that evoke the big mysteries of existence. But the proportions are exacting, anchored in science and engineering. You meet the museum’s curator, authoritative yet jovial, Victorianly stylish, earnest yet given to whimsy–it's none other than Mary Poppins! This imaginary gallery, it turns out, is really A. Kendra Greene’s new non-fiction collection No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. Like Poppins, Greene’s writing can sing. It also knows when to elucidate the straight facts of the matter. And like Poppins, Greene has traveled to far and secret places (see The Museum of Whales You Will Never See), both on the globe and in her mind. Her latest essays beautifully, sometimes arrestingly, display the scope of her thoughts and her deep, detail-steeped engagement with the marvels of the natural world. The book possesses an enchanting artisanal quality, no doubt abetted by Greene’s own excellent illustrations, inspired by a variety of sources like historical texts (she mentions in the Acknowledgments that she is “indebted to the old bestiaries” and goes on to name several of them), photographs, and her direct observations.
That’s all very well, you might say, but what does she actually write about? I suppose you wouldn’t be satisfied with the answer that reading one of Greene’s essays is like discovering what happens in the meadow at dusk. Depending on your sensibilities, it may be nothing, or everything. No, you implore, be specific: what are some of her subjects? In the moving “When Winston Became a Speck,” for instance, she explores a young child’s fascination with a story about a dog becoming a tiny speck due to distance, specifically the weight of the word “speck” in this context and the concept of zero. “Until It Pops” breathes fresh air into the world of balloon artistry, beginning with a random encounter with a woman named Laura at a wedding and extending to a full-on balloon convention, with ruminations on the science of latex along the way. What’s the difference between observing things and living with them? “Wild Chilean Baby Pears” investigates the question. “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy” recounts the author’s visits to a museum run by a man she refers to as the eponymous sorcerer, and evokes his enigmatic personality, unconventional interactions, and sudden disappearance. In the quietly mournful “My Mother Greets the Inanimate,” Greene recreates her mother's long-standing practice of greeting things like mountains, horses, fences, and what it means when she no longer does so.
I mentioned a museum. “I ache to believe there are things in the world that have the power to transform us,” Greene writes, “and I’m sure at least some of them are housed in museums.” A number are referenced throughout, such as the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Field Museum (Chicago). Zoos also abound: the Jardín Zoológico de Santiago (Chile’s national zoo), at which the author interned, New York’s Bronx Zoo, the Austin Zoo, and the Santa Barbara Zoo, for example, all instigate reflections. Naturally, in a book chock-a-block with these types of institutions–we gather along the way that the author herself has worked in a photo museum, at a bindery, and so on–wondrous creatures, living and extinct, could not be absent. Greene mentions dozens and dozens, like the basset hound, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the pileated woodpecker, the bullfrog, the peacock, the great auk, the lion cub, the duckmole, the alpaca, the sea urchin, the giant sloth, barnacle geese, and, pun intended, at great length, the giraffe. Animals are often part of quotations, analogies, or historical references; nature comes in handy when Greene is circling around more esoteric ponderings on things like the creation of meaning or the unpredictability of the universe. “We say extinct when the last living member of a species dies, but their properly preserved skins will last for centuries, never mind their bones,” she muses. “What we don’t have is a word for after extinction, for when we lose whatever’s left.” In “Flip” she writes: “Of course even now whales have hip bones and femurs, set snug, wholly encased, in the meat of muscle. Vestigial, we say, but nothing we keep is without meaning.” Other times she’s not afraid to go into full-throttle explicatory mode.
An unusual contrast of tones and styles, it took me a few pages and a few pauses to get used to. Greene comes to her subjects armed with the erudition and joyful intellectual curiosity of Stephen Jay Gould, but funneled through Annie Dillard’s quirky voice and gift for locating the sublime in the everyday. Or, imagine Oliver Sacks’s deeply humane writing brio blended with Eula Bliss’s ability to discover unexpected connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Or, to try in filmmaking terms: think of the punctilious, precisely orchestrated productions of Wes Anderson somehow combined with the evanescent and elliptical sensibility of Werner Herzog. Greene can at times trace the shape of her thoughts so finely that she herself seems to vanish in the process.
One of my favorite pieces, “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” displays a number of Greene’s virtues. In describing Scrooge's appearance she writes: “He has a waistcoat and a cravat and a silk hat. He has breeches and those shoes with conspicuous buckles.” The repeated “and” creates a sense of accumulation, of richness, emphasizing Scrooge’s tangible details with a slightly archaic, Dickensian feel (polysyndeton for the win!). “Parsimony derives from the Latin parsimonia,” she then explains, “meaning frugality and thrift, only later acquires the connotation of stinginess, becomes a synonym for Scrooge. Dickens, on the other hand, might as well be a synonym for abundance.” Indeed, as she has just stylistically demonstrated a few lines earlier. A page later she makes the fascinating observation that when we use Scrooge as a “shorthand for grinch, for cold unfeeling spite,” we’re completely ignoring the Scrooge at the end of the narrative who has been transformed–namely, the whole point of the story. We stick with the initial version, “as if we did not believe in change.” Astutely she notes: “I wager no one has ever said Scrooge and meant a person who’s undergone radical rehabilitation.” This attention to language, both in its evocation of subject matter and as a construct worth investigating in its own right, because it may encode hidden truths, are typical of Green’s polished yet particular form.
Eagerly touring the cabinet of wordsmithed curiosities, some readers may feel certain passages labored. The anaphorical incantation, for example, of the following lines, may read as plodding or affected: “I assume Visitor X was already familiar with the Iowa museum. I assume Visitor X had seen this very display more than once, had come back again and again. I assume he did not mean to take the ivory-billed, not at first.” A simple solution; pace yourself. Spacing out the collection’s twenty-six entries to the tune of one every two weeks will perfectly round out a full year, a leisurely rhythm sure to smooth out any stylistic speedbumps.
Even at their most staged, these essays never lack vitality. To use one of Greene’s own descriptive gems, the echidna’s “determined tank waddle gait” may be mannered, but it’s not unnatural. So it is with Greene’s own prose. And like the echidna, it comes “armored in spiny quills,” in this case memorable protrusions of insight and wonder, stemming from the greater quill of Greene’s rich capacity to observe and relate.
Imagine chancing upon a museum of literary sculptures. Each one is sinewy, casting mysterious shadows that evoke the big mysteries of existence. But the proportions are exacting, anchored in science and engineering. You meet the museum’s curator, authoritative yet jovial, Victorianly stylish, earnest yet given to whimsy–it's none other than Mary Poppins! This imaginary gallery, it turns out, is really A. Kendra Greene’s new non-fiction collection No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. Like Poppins, Greene’s writing can sing. It also knows when to elucidate the straight facts of the matter. And like Poppins, Greene has traveled to far and secret places (see The Museum of Whales You Will Never See), both on the globe and in her mind. Her latest essays beautifully, sometimes arrestingly, display the scope of her thoughts and her deep, detail-steeped engagement with the marvels of the natural world. The book possesses an enchanting artisanal quality, no doubt abetted by Greene’s own excellent illustrations, inspired by a variety of sources like historical texts (she mentions in the Acknowledgments that she is “indebted to the old bestiaries” and goes on to name several of them), photographs, and her direct observations.
That’s all very well, you might say, but what does she actually write about? I suppose you wouldn’t be satisfied with the answer that reading one of Greene’s essays is like discovering what happens in the meadow at dusk. Depending on your sensibilities, it may be nothing, or everything. No, you implore, be specific: what are some of her subjects? In the moving “When Winston Became a Speck,” for instance, she explores a young child’s fascination with a story about a dog becoming a tiny speck due to distance, specifically the weight of the word “speck” in this context and the concept of zero. “Until It Pops” breathes fresh air into the world of balloon artistry, beginning with a random encounter with a woman named Laura at a wedding and extending to a full-on balloon convention, with ruminations on the science of latex along the way. What’s the difference between observing things and living with them? “Wild Chilean Baby Pears” investigates the question. “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy” recounts the author’s visits to a museum run by a man she refers to as the eponymous sorcerer, and evokes his enigmatic personality, unconventional interactions, and sudden disappearance. In the quietly mournful “My Mother Greets the Inanimate,” Greene recreates her mother's long-standing practice of greeting things like mountains, horses, fences, and what it means when she no longer does so.
I mentioned a museum. “I ache to believe there are things in the world that have the power to transform us,” Greene writes, “and I’m sure at least some of them are housed in museums.” A number are referenced throughout, such as the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Field Museum (Chicago). Zoos also abound: the Jardín Zoológico de Santiago (Chile’s national zoo), at which the author interned, New York’s Bronx Zoo, the Austin Zoo, and the Santa Barbara Zoo, for example, all instigate reflections. Naturally, in a book chock-a-block with these types of institutions–we gather along the way that the author herself has worked in a photo museum, at a bindery, and so on–wondrous creatures, living and extinct, could not be absent. Greene mentions dozens and dozens, like the basset hound, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the pileated woodpecker, the bullfrog, the peacock, the great auk, the lion cub, the duckmole, the alpaca, the sea urchin, the giant sloth, barnacle geese, and, pun intended, at great length, the giraffe. Animals are often part of quotations, analogies, or historical references; nature comes in handy when Greene is circling around more esoteric ponderings on things like the creation of meaning or the unpredictability of the universe. “We say extinct when the last living member of a species dies, but their properly preserved skins will last for centuries, never mind their bones,” she muses. “What we don’t have is a word for after extinction, for when we lose whatever’s left.” In “Flip” she writes: “Of course even now whales have hip bones and femurs, set snug, wholly encased, in the meat of muscle. Vestigial, we say, but nothing we keep is without meaning.” Other times she’s not afraid to go into full-throttle explicatory mode.
An unusual contrast of tones and styles, it took me a few pages and a few pauses to get used to. Greene comes to her subjects armed with the erudition and joyful intellectual curiosity of Stephen Jay Gould, but funneled through Annie Dillard’s quirky voice and gift for locating the sublime in the everyday. Or, imagine Oliver Sacks’s deeply humane writing brio blended with Eula Bliss’s ability to discover unexpected connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Or, to try in filmmaking terms: think of the punctilious, precisely orchestrated productions of Wes Anderson somehow combined with the evanescent and elliptical sensibility of Werner Herzog. Greene can at times trace the shape of her thoughts so finely that she herself seems to vanish in the process.
One of my favorite pieces, “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” displays a number of Greene’s virtues. In describing Scrooge's appearance she writes: “He has a waistcoat and a cravat and a silk hat. He has breeches and those shoes with conspicuous buckles.” The repeated “and” creates a sense of accumulation, of richness, emphasizing Scrooge’s tangible details with a slightly archaic, Dickensian feel (polysyndeton for the win!). “Parsimony derives from the Latin parsimonia,” she then explains, “meaning frugality and thrift, only later acquires the connotation of stinginess, becomes a synonym for Scrooge. Dickens, on the other hand, might as well be a synonym for abundance.” Indeed, as she has just stylistically demonstrated a few lines earlier. A page later she makes the fascinating observation that when we use Scrooge as a “shorthand for grinch, for cold unfeeling spite,” we’re completely ignoring the Scrooge at the end of the narrative who has been transformed–namely, the whole point of the story. We stick with the initial version, “as if we did not believe in change.” Astutely she notes: “I wager no one has ever said Scrooge and meant a person who’s undergone radical rehabilitation.” This attention to language, both in its evocation of subject matter and as a construct worth investigating in its own right, because it may encode hidden truths, are typical of Green’s polished yet particular form.
Eagerly touring the cabinet of wordsmithed curiosities, some readers may feel certain passages labored. The anaphorical incantation, for example, of the following lines, may read as plodding or affected: “I assume Visitor X was already familiar with the Iowa museum. I assume Visitor X had seen this very display more than once, had come back again and again. I assume he did not mean to take the ivory-billed, not at first.” A simple solution; pace yourself. Spacing out the collection’s twenty-six entries to the tune of one every two weeks will perfectly round out a full year, a leisurely rhythm sure to smooth out any stylistic speedbumps.
Even at their most staged, these essays never lack vitality. To use one of Greene’s own descriptive gems, the echidna’s “determined tank waddle gait” may be mannered, but it’s not unnatural. So it is with Greene’s own prose. And like the echidna, it comes “armored in spiny quills,” in this case memorable protrusions of insight and wonder, stemming from the greater quill of Greene’s rich capacity to observe and relate.
January 13, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Tin House Books for an advance copy of this collection of essays that looks at the world through the eyes of a curious person, one not afraid to try something new or something strange in pursuit of understanding the world better, and sharing all that they have learned.
My brother always had a unique view of the world, one that got him a lot of looks, a lot of whispers, but a view that has stayed with him. My brother was a creative person, loved to draw, and loved to make things. His favorite was taking The Family Circus newspaper strips and making new captions for the cartoon. This starting off as fairly jokey, but as he got older became deeper and far more raunchy, most of which I have kept. My brother works in a creative industry using his mind and his view of the world to provide for his kids, both of which are taking after him in different ways. One can tell stories, the other can draw stories. A creative mind means the world isn't always black and white. There are a lot of shades. One wonders why things are supposed to be, why can't a shark have these eyes, and these teeth. Sometimes that creativity allows one to not be bothered by society norms, and try different things. Going to different countries to teach, and to learn, trying to shape balloons into new things. An artist one could say. A. Kendra Greene is that kind of artist, with the added gift of being a great writer, one who loves to learn, and share. No Less Strange or Wonderful is a collection of essays about the world, and about events in Greene's life both small and possibly life changing, and how all these moments make Greene the artist they have become.
The book consists of twenty-six essays all illustrated based on events from Greene's life, but look at the bigger issues that we all face. Life, a little death, love, being partners with someone and losing that someone. Greene discusses travels, teaching in Korea, working in Argentina, exhibits that Greene's has created in museums, and exhibits Greene has seen. Greene wonders about the life of a person who has stolen a taxidermied woodpecker, currently extinct from a museum display, who wrote that the woodpecker was doing well. Attending a balloon twister convention and wearing a dress of balloons designed to look like the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch. A dress that really changed the way she saw people, and how people saw Greene. The devil makes an appearance, first in Argentina, later in a dying bookstore, as a customer with good taste. A tree travelling down a street. Mixing shark parts to cause explosions. Finding love in an airport garage, or finding out about potentially disastrous medical news. The essays range in size and roam through time, each one illustrated in different ways, helping to tell the story, or explaining through art, what is being discussed.
Some of these essays remind me of life before becoming old and cynical. The way a child would view the world. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. Just the way before the world ruined us, the way I hope my nephews will always see things. When empathy wasn't a word, but a way children always acted, and thought the world worked. I really liked these essays. The mix of surreal, the mix of science and nature. Balloon twister conventions, broken arms from sleet, dressing slothes, and having to lock the house, as one's partner is forgetful to do. The essays twist in different ways, but all showing how amazing the world can be, how weird and different. And fun, if we let it. If we allow ourselves to.
One never knows what one will get in a collection of essays. I'm glad I read this one, I had a lot of fun, learned some stuff, laughed a bit, and had fun. A. Kendra Greene is a very good writer, an artist that I will have to be on the lookout for. I'm glad people like Greene are here, they make life less grey, and more magical.
My brother always had a unique view of the world, one that got him a lot of looks, a lot of whispers, but a view that has stayed with him. My brother was a creative person, loved to draw, and loved to make things. His favorite was taking The Family Circus newspaper strips and making new captions for the cartoon. This starting off as fairly jokey, but as he got older became deeper and far more raunchy, most of which I have kept. My brother works in a creative industry using his mind and his view of the world to provide for his kids, both of which are taking after him in different ways. One can tell stories, the other can draw stories. A creative mind means the world isn't always black and white. There are a lot of shades. One wonders why things are supposed to be, why can't a shark have these eyes, and these teeth. Sometimes that creativity allows one to not be bothered by society norms, and try different things. Going to different countries to teach, and to learn, trying to shape balloons into new things. An artist one could say. A. Kendra Greene is that kind of artist, with the added gift of being a great writer, one who loves to learn, and share. No Less Strange or Wonderful is a collection of essays about the world, and about events in Greene's life both small and possibly life changing, and how all these moments make Greene the artist they have become.
The book consists of twenty-six essays all illustrated based on events from Greene's life, but look at the bigger issues that we all face. Life, a little death, love, being partners with someone and losing that someone. Greene discusses travels, teaching in Korea, working in Argentina, exhibits that Greene's has created in museums, and exhibits Greene has seen. Greene wonders about the life of a person who has stolen a taxidermied woodpecker, currently extinct from a museum display, who wrote that the woodpecker was doing well. Attending a balloon twister convention and wearing a dress of balloons designed to look like the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch. A dress that really changed the way she saw people, and how people saw Greene. The devil makes an appearance, first in Argentina, later in a dying bookstore, as a customer with good taste. A tree travelling down a street. Mixing shark parts to cause explosions. Finding love in an airport garage, or finding out about potentially disastrous medical news. The essays range in size and roam through time, each one illustrated in different ways, helping to tell the story, or explaining through art, what is being discussed.
Some of these essays remind me of life before becoming old and cynical. The way a child would view the world. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. Just the way before the world ruined us, the way I hope my nephews will always see things. When empathy wasn't a word, but a way children always acted, and thought the world worked. I really liked these essays. The mix of surreal, the mix of science and nature. Balloon twister conventions, broken arms from sleet, dressing slothes, and having to lock the house, as one's partner is forgetful to do. The essays twist in different ways, but all showing how amazing the world can be, how weird and different. And fun, if we let it. If we allow ourselves to.
One never knows what one will get in a collection of essays. I'm glad I read this one, I had a lot of fun, learned some stuff, laughed a bit, and had fun. A. Kendra Greene is a very good writer, an artist that I will have to be on the lookout for. I'm glad people like Greene are here, they make life less grey, and more magical.
January 5, 2025
I am only 38 pages into this book and already love it.
A. Kendra Greene knows how to look at things. She sees more than just the thing itself and is masterful at telling us about it. (I can see the dog that looks like a coffee table and was laughed when I saw its cousin on my block last week.) This author is the person you'd want to bring with you to the art gallery, the museum, and the public garden for people-watching. It's rare for me to feel this transported as a reader. I can see a museum described in the essay and can imagine the stolen artifact. I am gobbling up this reading experience.
I loved this part about two bird specimens:
"...lying on their sides in an acid-free box, the female on her left wing, the male on his right, a sympathetic symmetry, facing each other forever in the dark."
How beautiful.
As I read this book, I recognize my greed. There aren't many books that activate my brain in this particular way. I want a coffee table version of this book. I want Oliver Caplan to compose the music for a PBS production about it. These stories are so alive, I want more and can't wait to continue.
I received an advance reader's copy from Tin House in exchange for an honest review. More to come as I continue reading.
A. Kendra Greene knows how to look at things. She sees more than just the thing itself and is masterful at telling us about it. (I can see the dog that looks like a coffee table and was laughed when I saw its cousin on my block last week.) This author is the person you'd want to bring with you to the art gallery, the museum, and the public garden for people-watching. It's rare for me to feel this transported as a reader. I can see a museum described in the essay and can imagine the stolen artifact. I am gobbling up this reading experience.
I loved this part about two bird specimens:
"...lying on their sides in an acid-free box, the female on her left wing, the male on his right, a sympathetic symmetry, facing each other forever in the dark."
How beautiful.
As I read this book, I recognize my greed. There aren't many books that activate my brain in this particular way. I want a coffee table version of this book. I want Oliver Caplan to compose the music for a PBS production about it. These stories are so alive, I want more and can't wait to continue.
I received an advance reader's copy from Tin House in exchange for an honest review. More to come as I continue reading.
February 14, 2025
A Kendra Greene’s collection of essays, No Less Strange or Wonderful, is one of those books where I can admire the craft and ability but have to acknowledge that the essays generally did not do much for me. There’s no doubt that Greene has a way with language, word choice, and metaphor, plays well with structure, and there were a number of lines or passages that were particularly strong. But in their wholeness the essays were a mixed bag, with several (particularly the closing essay) feeling far too long and others in contrast feeling too slight in substance and length. Generally as well the book felt like it petered out with the last few being among my least liked.
My favorites among the collection were:
“Wild Chilean Baby Pears”
“Love is in the airport”
“The Ghost of Christmas Always” (some of my favorite sections though not sure this one cohered all the way)
“Ted Cruz is a Sentient Bag of Wasps” (probably the most fun and most engaging)
While not a fan of the book overall, I do think it’s worth checking out of the library for the several quite strong essays, and then of course, you might find yourself responding more positively than I did to the obvious talent.
My favorites among the collection were:
“Wild Chilean Baby Pears”
“Love is in the airport”
“The Ghost of Christmas Always” (some of my favorite sections though not sure this one cohered all the way)
“Ted Cruz is a Sentient Bag of Wasps” (probably the most fun and most engaging)
While not a fan of the book overall, I do think it’s worth checking out of the library for the several quite strong essays, and then of course, you might find yourself responding more positively than I did to the obvious talent.
February 28, 2025
This book is very well named; it is indeed "strange" and "wonderful" and full of "curiosity" (as the subtitle suggests). These essays, ranging in length from quite short to quite long, wander playfully through a variety of scientific topics. For instance, the statement "Ted Cruise is a bag of sentient wasps" expands into something other than the political commentary one might expect--it is not about Ted Cruise at all, but about wasps, about how we humans feel about wasps, about what we get wrong about them, about what a sentient wasp might think or do. An essay about making a pretend giraffe with your hands turns into an essay about what we say and don't say to children, and what they're willing to say back to us; it's an exploration of play and storytelling and how we pass on our beliefs, but it is partly (not mainly) an essay about giraffes. My favorite essay is about dressing the model of a giant sloth. I greatly enjoyed the surprise of each one--they made me think and wonder and filled me with delight.
Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.
Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.
February 11, 2025
NO LESS STRANGE OR WONDERFUL is an inventive collection of essays centered on curiosity, one that surprises time and again while always circling back to graceful introspection and the human condition. A. Kendra Greene writes with what can only be described as searing nonchalance. “The first time I met the devil, I was walking down a steep dirt road…” one essay begins. Another, “The ledger of my body is written on the right-hand side.” These matter-of-fact phrases are situated alongside anecdotes of uneasy encounters with men and the stories behind various scars. Greene is masterful at meta commentary throughout the collection, including a wrenching exploration of metaphor when an ultrasound technician compares her left breast to “a sack of gravel.” The essay, which takes its title from the metaphor, is one of the more profound and nuanced considerations of breast tumors that I have read, and an instant addition to my curriculum. This is a collection of essays that will resonate with a broad spectrum of readers, that will make you laugh and leave you deep in existential thought.
March 4, 2025
By turns bittersweet and hopeful, funny and sad, this collection subverts the reader’s narrative expectations. “Sack of Gravel,” a favorite, details a potential medical diagnosis alongside illustrations, turning the essay to an examination of body as landscape, questioning the idea of the human body and its strangeness. Some of the essays provide unexpected descriptions and situations, making life feel once again unexpected in a magical way: in one, the narrator wears a dress made of balloons, and another is a thoughtful examination of what “lives” in a museum or on display versus what we might wish to carry home. Several invite the reader to view from a new angle the world of animals: "baby giraffes are born as snakes." I enjoyed the format of the book, choosing to read a few essays each sitting or flip to a random essay intrigued by the illustrations in its proximity. The book lends itself to dipping in and out so that you might read a bit and daydream, which I know I will do with this book for some time.
Thanks to Tin House for the ARC!
Thanks to Tin House for the ARC!
April 22, 2025
I felt about this book much as I do about poetry — it put words to many of my emotions that I didn’t know could be spoken. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know that while I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, I do love a book of essays expanding upon the ways in which the world is a treasure. They give me hope. So naturally I was extremely excited about a book subtitled “essays in curiosity” — I imagine I was a normal child, interested all facets of the giant world around me. And then after going through the natural cycle of outgrowing wonder and becoming somewhat cynical, I’ve come round again to simple joy at the smallest of marvels. Everything from the strange oddities to everyday occurrences are worthy of a closer look, and that’s what Greene examines here. There were a few chapters that went on a bit long for me, but I imagine that I might get something else from those upon a second or third read, and I’m looking forward to it.
November 5, 2024
First I want to note that I'm giving this 5/5 for what it's described to be. This is different from my usual reviewing, where it's much more subjective and mood-based. For those who follow my reviews/have a sense of how I review and have similar interests, just note that this isn't really a "I recommend you read this" 5/5, as it wasn't really my thing.
With that out of the way, this was such a beautiful collection. More than once I wanted to print out the illustrations and use them as art for my son's room. I'm curious to see whether this will be more of a novel, or a coffee table book? It could really go either way, if you ask me.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, A. Kendra Greene and Tin House Books for the DRC in exchange for my honest review!}
With that out of the way, this was such a beautiful collection. More than once I wanted to print out the illustrations and use them as art for my son's room. I'm curious to see whether this will be more of a novel, or a coffee table book? It could really go either way, if you ask me.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, A. Kendra Greene and Tin House Books for the DRC in exchange for my honest review!}
April 11, 2025
This book is probably considered slow-paced in text but I found it to be well paced in audio. Each essay seemed to go on tangents and/or combined seemingly unrelated topics and at the end, it most always worked. Though I didn't fall in love with every story, I did find the book as a whole amusing, entertaining, and enlightening. I learned things that really tied into some of the topics I love in sociology. especially the profane and the sacred. I really enjoyed: The Two Times You Meet the Devil, I Can Feel Your Human Fingers, Ted Cruz is a Sentient Bag of Wasps, and By Degrees. May purchase just for the little nuggets of great impact that are hidden in this whirlwind of imagination, facts and humanity.
April 15, 2025
No Less Strange or Wonderful is the friend who always has an interesting story to share in book form. I read this slowly - dipping in and out, an essay or two here and there. And sometimes in between, I would find myself trying to remember who told me about something before remembering it was from the book.
As with most essay collections - some worked more for me than others but overall this was a really interesting read and the physical book is beautiful with a gorgeously printed cover and interesting illustrations throughout. And for a couple weeks now I find myself randomly whispering “I can feel your human fingers” (iykyk). Thank you to the publisher for the gifted ebook, I purchased the physical book.
As with most essay collections - some worked more for me than others but overall this was a really interesting read and the physical book is beautiful with a gorgeously printed cover and interesting illustrations throughout. And for a couple weeks now I find myself randomly whispering “I can feel your human fingers” (iykyk). Thank you to the publisher for the gifted ebook, I purchased the physical book.
December 5, 2025
This was my first foray into audiobooks and it was perhaps not a good choice. The narration bothered me - the rhythm and cadence of the reading was too formulaic and composed, not easy to focus on. The selection of essays are very well-written but the subject matter was not endearing to me. Perhaps if I only read one essay at a time; or if I were reading to begin with - but I found my brain wandering in and out, not exactly following much of her discourse. What I enjoyed were the trivia bits - little pieces of knowledge about different animals or word etymology - but they were only mentioned in passing and not discussed at length, so hard for me to remember. This is not a critique of the author - I think she is a wonderful essayist - just not sure that this was the book for me.
March 4, 2025
This was a delightful little journey in the vein of World of Wonders and The Book of Delights. In each essay, the author, who seems to have a collection of unique and varied experiences, goes down a little rabbit hole of contemplation, mulling over the idiosyncrasies of animals and human interactions and what it means to be a good neighbor. There’s nothing I love more than glimpsing the inside of someone else’s mind, and Greene’s seems like a gentle, curious, benevolent place to be. The essays are well-written and meandering, while occasionally hitting a sharp and painful reality—the essay about the balloon dress and being snowed in particularly stood out to me.
I received this e-galley in exchange for an honest review.
I received this e-galley in exchange for an honest review.
November 8, 2025
Read by the author, who is good at that as she seems to be at so many other things. The essays are all autobiographical, and I particularly enjoyed the funnier passages, like the profile of Rusty the giant sloth. But what sticks most in my mind are her experiences modeling Marilyn Monroe's iconic dress made in twisted balloons (and the way people responded to it--she was even groped!), and a throwaway line about how a couple planning their wedding hired a "metaphor consultant." Gotta wonder how one finds one of those.
March 26, 2025
It's so hard to rate a book of essays or short stories. Some of them are 5 stars. Some are 3 or less stars. I'm going to go with a 4 star rating. This book is more strange than wonderful, but not a bad way to spend a little time. After reading I thought "what was the point of my reading this?" and then wondered why I thought that. I don't think that after reading a novel. I guess the point is to pass the time and that's what I did while reading this.
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