Here are some highlights from a dozen books I’ve read recently. My comments in italics, the rest are direct quotes from the books (chosen for the point made or the eloquence of prose), and all bolding is my own.
Wellness: A Novel by Nathan Hill
A well written novel about middle age.
She tucks her legs under them as she sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.
His apartment—a desolate little box of unadorned white walls and a cinder-block bookshelf and a futon condemned to the floor—is not a home that anticipates guests. Loneliness, it seems, holds him like a buttonhole.
Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon—only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction.
No, the way she said goodbye to him each night was the way everyone signed off on all of the YouTube channels he followed, which Toby found weirdly comforting: “Don’t forget to subscribe,” she whispered softly, near his ear. “Don’t forget to subscribe,” he said, facedown, his words muffled by the pillow.
She leans into the kiss and they make out—leisurely, then passionately, then tenderly, then back to passionately—just kissing for forty-five minutes straight,
“But I’ve seen you with your husband. You do not lack for romance.” “Seriously, Elizabeth, go have an affair. Or better yet, tell Jack to have an affair. Afterward, he will be a thousand percent more attractive to you. It’s like witchcraft.”
A prairie does not have the grandeur of a mountain range, nor the austerity of a desert, nor the gothic mystery of a forest, nor the romance of the sea. A prairie is a lawn, and it’s hard to have extravagant feelings about a lawn. Jack has a theory about this, about why the prairie is a disrespected landscape, why when we see it, we don’t really see it: it’s because you can’t capture a prairie in a picture. It is notoriously difficult to depict a prairie two-dimensionally. Even to the naked eye, it already looks flat—this despite the fact that walking the Flint Hills can be exhausting…
“Marriage, my dear, is a condition whereby you find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you’re willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life.”
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Fantastic new novel from the living legend.
He believed himself to be more interesting than he was – but then who didn’t? Did I know anyone who genuinely thought themselves uninteresting?
‘The main thing is to have a purpose, not necessarily to achieve it.’ Kristian Hadeland, 1985
But it’s not necessarily about being seen in the sense of being validated, even if for many artists that can be a driving force. Art basically is about communication. Every work of art is an expression of something. But in order for the work to actually convey anything at all, in order for it to actually exist, then clearly it has to be seen. So, no work of art in fact exists until it’s seen. Without an audience, it remains meaningless.’
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst
A gripping true story account of a couple that sets sail on a small boat, their boat capsizes, and then they find a way to survive at sea.
Trapped inside a person, grief can feel like a rising tide of water, something vast and dramatic requiring release. But once spoken, it tends to reveal itself to be the same, small essential things, over and over. He missed her. He struggled without her. He wished she were still there.
The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer
One of the most incisive foreign policy analysts shares a range of thoughts on foreign policy worldviews.
In sum, I begin with two simple assumptions about human nature: there are significant limits on our ability to reason about first principles, and we are social animals at our core.
There has never been anything approximating a universal consensus on what constitutes the good life, and no good reason to think there ever will be.
Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
One of the canonical introductions to Enneagram personality tests.
Every shift of emotion, every variation of warmth or cooling by others registers immediately in the Three’s psyche, in the same way that a sunbather can tell when the thinnest cloud comes between him and the sun.
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard
A provocative set of reflections cultivating a philosophical outlook. A bit academic but instructive on Socrates.
There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it. You tell yourself you don’t have time at the moment; you’re focused on making it through the next fifteen minutes. There is a lot to get done in a day. There are the hours you spend at your job, the chores to take care of at home. There are movies to be seen, books to be read, music to be listened to, friendships to catch up on, vacations to be taken. Your life is full. It has no space for the question, “Why am I doing any of this?”
Many of us have become gifted at endowing everyday tasks with such urgency: I “must” go to the store, I “have to” get to work, I “need to” call my parents, I am “very busy”—after all of which I probably “deserve” a break during which the last thing I want to do is embark upon an exhausting existential inquiry. We learn to take life fifteen minutes at a time. And if you add up enough of those fifteen-minute periods, the sum total is a whole life. This is what T. S. Eliot refers to when he writes, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” We find a way to avoid ever asking, “What will come from my whole life?”
Thinking, as Socrates understands it, is not something that happens in your head, but rather out loud, in conversation. Socrates argues that it is only by recognizing thinking as a social interaction that we can resolve a set of paradoxes as to how thinking can be open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-oriented. The Socratic motto is not, “Question everything,” but “Persuade or be persuaded.”
Socratic ethics is the ethics of living a truly philosophical life, and it tells you that the way you should conduct yourself in each of these three domains is: inquisitively. It promises to make people freer and more equal; more romantic; and more courageous.
Instead of adding to our store of knowledge—as the biographer, or the cartographer, or the biologist might—Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.
We reflexively engage in a kind of interpersonal balancing: if I admit I am bad at something, then you have to say you’re also bad at something, or point out that I’m good at something else. We are anxious to even out the appearance of difference in abilities, in social standing, in success. We are especially vigilant in policing asymmetries of affection: if I want to be talking to you more than you want to be talking to me, that is something that it is rarely permissible to be explicit about.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Great novel about ambition and race and other topics.
She called her mother one night and confessed something shameful: she wanted to settle down, have a few kids, live in the suburbs. Her mother, the aging beatnik, perpetually single, said that she couldn’t believe she’d raised a daughter who had such bourgeois Restoration Hardware fantasies. Wasn’t it ironic, she said, how women spent their twenties trying to catch a man and have his babies, then spent the next decade wishing they could escape through a bathtub drain? Settling down was just a euphemism for inching toward death.
Jane had discovered somewhere along the way that if you did not have money there were benefits to hanging around with people who did. Rich friends got divorced, or they got restless; they went away on sabbaticals and film shoots and retreats. They didn’t stay in one place, and they needed people to watch their possessions or pets or plants.
One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs. A brain could take only so much purple prose and mechanical epiphany.
She too had parents who were overeducated and underpaid—it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggested class and privilege without actual class and privilege—gauche caviar without the actual caviar. Jane remembered wishing at a certain point, Ruby’s age maybe, that she came from a dignified working-class immigrant family. Her kind of poverty was the loneliest kind, the least dignified kind, because her parents had chosen it. They had picked poetry over profit.
Dennis Mulholland used to say every story has two beginnings. The first is page one—the place where you actually begin the story—but the second beginning comes later, the inciting incident.
No Ordinary Dog: My Partner from the SEAL Teams to the Bin Laden Raid by Will Chesney with Joe Layden
I didn’t know much about the world of military dogs. This is a nice, easy read on the dog — and human — who served on the SEAL team that took down bin Laden.
Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult by Ellen Huet
Well written deep dive into the orgasmic meditation wave that took San Francisco by storm a decade ago.
The Mind Reels by Fredrik deBoer
I read everything Freddie writes. This first novel of his is a compelling look at the experience of having a mental illness.
Flesh: A Novel by David Szalay
Booker-prize winning novel that’s quite engaging all the way through. Taut prose.
Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis
A refreshingly cyncial / realistic account of fatherhood from a master of the writing craft.
“This wasn’t entirely true, but it’d pass cleanly through any polygraph.”
If you have a gift for frightening new parents, your fortune in this world is secure. New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about.
After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.