FROM: Books for Living by Will Schwalbe (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2017)

“Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life. By comparing what you’ve done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone; it’s a solitary activity that connects you to others.”

“Then, as a reader, I become influenced while I’m reading. I’m not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones.” ****

“Every book changes your life. So I like to ask: How is this book changing mine?”

“On the other hand, I think any age is a good age for big questions. I asked some of my biggest and best when I was in high school and college—fittingly, as that’s what school is for.” (Here, see Mark Edmonson about “reading” big questions.)

“I believe that everything you need to know you can find in a book.”—(eg.) People have always received life-guiding wisdom from certain types of non-fiction, often from “self help” books…But I have found that all sorts of books can carry this kind of wisdom; a random sentence in a thriller will give me unexpected insight… (here an example…Killing Floor, the “masterful” 1997 novel that introduced the world to Jack Reader…and the “wisdom”!! “Waiting is a skill like anything else.”

“Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity.” (Here, I agree)

“THERE’S A PARTICULAR KIND OF HOPE IS SOMETIMES HAVE WHEN I START A BOOK. IT’S THAT MAYBE, JUST MAYBE—EVEN THOUGH IT GOES AGAINST ALL MY EXPERIENCE TO DATE—I MIGHT BE STARTING ONE BOOK THAT GIVES ME ALL THE ANSWERS I’LL EVER NEED. IT COULD HAPPEN. MY GINSU KNIFE. MY HOLY GRAIL.”

(Good grief…) And here, our author cites Lin Yutang’s pop book ‘The Importance of Living’ with its cliché’s and banality…

Here it is—the desire for coherence: “Mental well-being depends on one’s belief that life is orderly, comprehensible structured and predictable. ‘As Freud thought’, psychological illness is born of a narrative incoherence, a life story veering off course.”

The poet D.M. Thomas: “The unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist.”

****This last is patent scientific nonsense.