The first was Herbert Gold’s incredible (but taxing) novel, “The Man Who Was Not With It” (1964). That made me want to reread a couple of books about carnys I’d read when I was young. What I really liked was his piece about his experiences living the carny life (being a carnival worker).
That was OK, too, an example of the participatory journalism that emerged in the 60s. It was just OK, but it led me to read a non-fiction collection of his magazine pieces called “Blood and Grits” (1979). It was an entertaining sendup of American mass culture, TV worship and the Holy Church of the automobile. I read somewhere that the 1960s southern writer Harry Crews had written a book about a man who ate a car. One of the trends I followed this year was weird. Sheer entertainment, if you are philosophically bent. If your mind contains floating bits of isolated knowledge about American thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James or Europeans such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Wagner, here is your chance to put them all together into a coherent scheme. The first was “American Philosophy: A Love Story” (2016), and that was followed by this year’s “Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are” (2019). John Kaag is a youngish philosopher who has written two enchanting books that will please anyone intrigued by the birth and spread of American philosophical ideas. A compelling book that drove me back to it time and again whenever a chore interrupted. But the step-by-step description of her intellectual, psychological and spiritual liberation is as thrilling as those written by Rousseau or St. Westover’s life in a rural western Mormon family were terrible and make for compulsive reading. A memoir, it follows a tyrannized girl through her childhood and teen years into her adult emancipation. The single best book I read, superb in every way, was Tara Westover’s “Educated” (2018). I offer the following observations in the hope that you may find something here that will bring you pleasure in your next reading year.
0 kommentar(er)
