And that sometimes all you need to do in order to rise up again is to keep moving forward.” Many aphorisms sound right, if hardly groundbreaking-e.g., a quick route to happiness is making someone else happy “No is a good word. His father said to him, “If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here.” He was correct, a bit of wisdom Haig turned to during his depression when he focused on moving forward: “It is important to remember the bottom of the valley never has the clearest view. On being lost, Haig recounts an episode with his father when they got turned around in a forest in France. Much is left unsaid and left up to readers to dissect. Most chapters are only a few sentences long, the longest running for three pages. The author’s words are instigations, hopeful first steps toward illumination. This makes some of the material worthy of a second look, even when it feels runic or contrary to experience. Years ago, Haig experienced an extended period of suicidal depression, so he comes at many of these topics-pain, hope, self-worth, contentment-from a hard-won perspective. Like many collections of this sort-terse snippets of advice, from the everyday to the cosmic-some parts will hit home with surprising insight, some will feel like old hat, and others will come across as disposable or incomprehensible.
But surprises abound, including four books by and about Muhammad Ali (“a larger-than-life figure: not just an incandescent athlete dancing under the lights, but a man of conscience who spoke truth to power”) Richard Flanagan’s “dazzling, phantasmagorical” Gould’s Book of Fish Tommy Orange’s “fierce, sad, funny, and transcendent novel” There, There the Harry Potter books (“one of literature’s ultimate bildungsromans” two “heart-stopping books” about the war on terror (David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service) and a sprightly biography of Frank Sinatra.īestselling author Haig offers a book’s worth of apothegms to serve as guides to issues ranging from disquietude to self-acceptance. Kakutani focuses on many canonical texts, including The Federalist Papers, George Washington’s Farewell Address, Moby-Dick, Frankenstein, Winesburg, Ohio, The Waste Land, The Great Gatsby, and Invisible Man and on canonical authors, such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, George Orwell, and Toni Morrison. Seuss stories with her own, unfortunate, doggerel), and young adult fiction.
They “can surprise and move us, challenge our certainties, and goad us into reexamining our default settings.” The essays themselves are more perceptive, offering fresh, inspired assessments of a wide range of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry: memoir, biography, and history social, political, environmental, and cultural analysis nature writing children’s books (she responds to six Dr. Books, she writes, “can transport us back to the past” and “forward to idealized or dystopian futures,” take us to far-off places, and introduce us to beliefs different from our own. In the introduction, Kakutani rehearses predictable assertions about the benefits of reading.
Aiming to encourage reading and rereading, she presents succinct essays on more than 130 books that she believes “deserve as wide an audience as possible,” ranging from the Odyssey to Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, “an unsparing rumination on identity” published in 2019. Pulitzer Prize winner Kakutani, former chief book critic at the New York Times, has been a capacious, eclectic reader since childhood. A literary critic celebrates books that she has loved.
0 kommentar(er)
