Gerald Murnane. Inland. (1989).
A lovely X-ray of provincial childhood, wrapped in metafictional padding to which I was often indifferent but that sometimes carried off the magic trick as intended.
Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.