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Items14
1
Journal of a Solitude (1973)
8.5/10on Open Library
Published
An opening entry about having the house to herself again sets up the tension in Sarton’s journal. Time alone lets her think and write, yet other people and their visits keep mattering. A New Hampshire garden and its changing seasons give her somewhere concrete to look when her attention swings between the pleasures and costs of being alone.
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Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863–1865
Davis records news of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s assassination in the same brief daily form she uses for the social life of her Philadelphia community. The scale is part of the value. A seamstress and student makes room for church, friends, and the war in a few lines at a time. Judith Giesberg’s introduction and the project’s notes help orient you when a name or a local reference comes up.
More about Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863–18653
Modern nature (1991)
8.6/10on Open Library
Published
Jarman watches saxifrage and sea kale take hold in a wind-battered coastal garden while film projects, friends, and AIDS keep pulling his attention elsewhere. The plants have a calendar of their own. Reading several entries together lets you feel how differently a growing season and a stretch of illness can mark the same passage of time.
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The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
Handwriting, paintings, and poems share these journal pages. Look at a painted page before turning to the English translation and Sarah M. Lowe’s commentary. You’ll have a chance to see what the colors and the position of the words already told you, and what only becomes clear once you can read them.
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Diary of a Young Naturalist (2020)
Published
Spring starts with sparrows digging moss out of a gutter. A school move, exams, and conservation work also have their place in this year of entries from Northern Ireland. McAnulty gives you a teenager’s changing calendar and a place to practice his kind of close attention, even if the closest patch of wildlife is the roof outside a window.
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Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945
Hachiya was directing the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the atomic bomb fell. His day-by-day record puts you alongside a doctor trying to care for patients amid damage he and his colleagues are still learning to understand. Follow their changing understanding from the day of the bombing through the end of September. Warner Wells translated and edited the diary, and this edition has a foreword by John W. Dower.
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Narrow Road to the Interior
Bashō recounts his journey into northern Japan in brief prose passages linked to poems. A few lines of verse can change what you thought mattered in the scene before them. Sam Hamill’s translation includes other travel sketches, making it possible to compare how Bashō shapes different journeys for a reader.
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The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965
Working sketches for novels jostle with sharp portraits of friends and the problem of keeping a household going on too little money. Powell is particularly good company if you enjoy seeing a novelist’s eye at work on the people and pressures around her. Tim Page’s edition selects from a much larger body of surviving notebooks.
More about The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–19659
The Journal, 1837-1861 (2009)
Published
Thoreau’s walks kept giving him things to compare with what he had noticed earlier. Read a stretch of entries to see how a season accumulates on the page and how observing the same surroundings can occupy a writer for years. Damion Searls’s one-volume selection is about 700 pages, so it still offers plenty of room to wander.
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The Diaries of Franz Kafka
A dream, a draft letter, or an unfinished story can sit among Kafka’s notes on daily events. Ross Benjamin’s translation restores entries and details that earlier editions left out. It also retains the rough edges of the notebooks, so this is a particularly good edition for watching Kafka try out an idea before he knows where it will go.
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A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940
In Tuscany, Origo tries to work out whether Italy will enter the war. She puts newspaper reports, foreign broadcasts, and what she hears through contacts side by side. Follow her changing judgment rather than racing to the outcome. The diary lets you see the work of trying to find usable information while people around her disagree about what it means.
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The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2019)
Published
Choose Karen V. Kukil’s edition to read the surviving journals with more of their detail than the earlier selected edition allowed. You can follow Plath’s years as a student and writer on the scale of individual days, before her notes have had time to harden into a story about where her work was going.
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Diary (1988)
Published
Writing in Argentina for a Polish émigré audience, Gombrowicz makes a diary out of notes, arguments, and confessions he knows people will read. That makes his address to the reader part of the texture. Look for how quickly a personal concern turns into an argument about writing or public life. This English volume restores ten pages from 1969.
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Sketchbook, 1966-1971 (2023)
Published
Frisch can linger over his home in Berzona and then turn to Swiss authorities’ treatment of protesters. Travel, architecture, and politics keep interrupting each other in a diary he shaped for publication. Simon Pare’s translation follows the German edition that put back material removed from the original, a useful detail if you want to read the diary as a made book.
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