I check the analytics for my website, and something I’ve noticed recently is an upsurge in traffic for this list of books I read last summer. For some reason, people seem to be checking that one out lately. So I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve been reading lately! Maybe in a couple months I will update you all again.
1. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher
This book appeared on some type of “life hack” list I stumbled across online, along with The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (which I also read, and thought that wasn’t bad either). The thing about life hacks and books of this nature that I find kinda laughable is that it’s usually stuff that’s usually quite obvious, but they’re somehow still helpful. They’re always things that are right under your nose, but you’d never realize it unless you read it. For example, things like suggesting you press “60 seconds” instead of “1:00” when you’re microwaving something to save time are not necessarily brilliant, but still worth knowing and kinda amusing.
I found this book to be similar to innocuous internet life hacks: intellectuals always tend to belabour the point about certain things, and manage to complicate what are very simple truths. The whole point of the book is: whatever you focus on, that’s what you’ll end up becoming. If you can learn how to refocus your brain, your life on earth might go a little smoother. Very obvious, simple stuff. But I found most of it interesting and worth reading nonetheless. Even if you know certain things about life sometimes it can be beneficial to read them again to understand just exactly how what you’ve learned is correct. It’s thought provoking to imagine that your experience on earth is all a matter of perception: you could be having a terrible time, but you might not realize it’s just your brain paying attention to certain aspects of a story over others. If you’re more conscious of what your brain is doing it’s easier to pay attention to the better things in your life. Metacognition FTW.
2. Bukowski, A Life: The Centennial Edition by Neeli Cherkovski
I’m a big Bukowski fan. Not just his work, but I’ve always liked the man himself behind the work. Something about his life story has always resonated very deeply with me, and I’ve always seen a bit of myself in him. People think he was only about drinking alcohol and womanizing and being vulgar, but to me that’s ignoring what he’s really about. He’s one of those unique artists that transcends time, and couldn’t have been created in a lab somewhere. A guy like Bukowski cannot be imitated, his art could have only been born out of a miserable life created by happenstance, America, and rough living. It feels like the universe gave him to us, something about his work feels truly timeless and magical in that regard. This is a man who grew up during the depression, and didn’t experience any form of success from his writing until most of his life was behind him.
I don’t even read him for the alcoholism stuff, I relate to him being an only child, his feelings of loneliness and isolation, difficulty making friendships, always feeling like an outcast at school and the world in general, and of course the drudgery and anger of meaningless minimum wage jobs where you’re treated awfully. When I first discovered his work as a 20 year old I was working at a dollar store and his work really spoke to me. To know that someone else out there, decades before I was born, lived through the same stuff was a comforting revelation.
Anyway, there’s not much I didn’t already know about Bukowski, so I went into reading this not really expecting much. Turns out, this was actually great and informative. It’s written by one of Bukowski’s closest friends, and I got to experience a new side to him I never had before. Even though the author retells some of the things we already know, there are also a lot of insights here about how he was at various times in his life. It seems to me that Bukowski was never really the kind of guy who was ever striving for any kind of massive success. The end goal for him was never really about becoming a bestselling author or whatever, he just enjoyed the peace of mind that came with writing. He’s the kind of guy that would’ve kept his head down and kept writing regardless of the outcome because it cured his inner demons and he just loved doing it. The fact that he turned out to be one of the greatest American writers ever was almost sort of a happy accident.
3. Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
This is an author I had to study at U of T for one of my Canadian fiction classes, and I remembered liking her work in the past when we read A Bird in the House. I found this book in a bin at my local library being sold for like 50 cents or something, so I bought it and decided to check it out when my reading list had reached an end. Now that we’re stuck in a pandemic, I finally got around to picking this one up off my bookshelf.
Jest of God is a thin, really easy to read novel. It almost doesn’t feel like a novel because it goes by so quick. Personally, I consider a novel something that features a great passage of time. By the end of it you have to feel like a lot has happened and the characters have gone through a lot, and possibly even aged quite a bit. In that regard, this felt more like a novella; it’s only like a brief period in a young woman’s life that doesn’t encompass a whole lot of time. But what I really liked about it was reading: what a teacher’s life was like many years ago, how the dynamics between men and women were like several decades ago, and the relationship between the main character and her mother. I live with my parents and it is a very challenging life: I was led to believe that my adulthood was going to be so much cooler than it actually is, but here I am stuck in my childhood home all these years later. Reading this book amused me at various points because the protagonist lives with her mother and struggles with similar things, and her internal monologue throughout is kinda funny and dark at times. Another hallmark of a great piece of writing for me is that it has to stand the test of time, and I believe this book certainly does.
4. You Are Still Being Lied To edited by Russ Kick
I first heard about this book mentioned by one of my favourite stand-up comics of all time: Doug Stanhope. I consider him to be one of the brightest comedians to ever do it, with a lot of intellect behind his material, so I would pretty much read anything he mentions. This is an older book, and some of the stuff in here might be a little dated, but it’s still worth reading due to a bunch of thought-provoking articles in here by smart people like Noam Chomsky that are still relevant today. There are numerous contributors, but it all adds up to the same thing: question everything you are told, especially by the media.
One of my favourite pieces of info in this book is that Dr. Seuss, who later wrote the famous environmental book The Lorax, once worked for a marketing company where he was responsible for doing an ad campaign for very harmful pesticides. The same guy who made people think about the earth also played a role in getting them to accept harmful chemicals that became a household name; he did as much damage as he did good. The book is filled with interesting bits of info like that. It would be cool to see a newer version of this due to how much crazier the world has gotten since it was published (the early 2000s), but even though it feels like it’s from a different time it’s still cool.
5. Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love and Loss by Stephanie Wittels Wachs
For those unfamiliar: Harris Wittels had a really unique comedic mind, he was seriously hilarious and underrated. The moment I knew he was a genius was in 2012, when I was watching Season 3, Episode 2 of Eastbound & Down. That show was already wildly original and unlike any other TV show, but when I saw that specific episode my mind was blown. It’s one of those pieces of media where you cannot believe they actually got away with doing it on television, even by HBO standards. It’s almost a full decade since the episode has aired, and I don’t think I’ve seen an episode of television since that has knocked the wind outta my sails as much. Something about it is just so batshit crazy I remember thinking, “How on earth did they come up with that storyline and actually pull it off in a comedy?” When I looked up the writers of that episode afterward, sure enough: Harris Wittels was one of the people responsible. From the airing of that episode onward, I began to hear his name more and more in the comedy community as a guy to keep an eye on, I was looking forward to it. Great things were on the way.
Three years later, just as his career was about to really start taking off…..he tragically died of an overdose at the age of 30. I’ve never lost anyone to drugs, but I have lost a few people unfortunately. This book was written by Harris’ sister, and what I really like about it is how well it depicts a person in grief. It’s such a diverse gamut of emotions: depression, anger, pain. She does a great job showing what grief is like, and there are great Harris anecdotes in here I never heard before. One of the sad things about drug addiction is that we tend to think it attracts an unintelligent section of the population, but what the book illustrates is Harris had a really sharp mind. When you read what he was like before the addiction struggles it makes it even sadder to think what the world lost. RIP.