After the year’s best reads in
science
,
children’s books
,
psychology and philosophy
, and
art, design, and photography
, here come the finest memoirs, biographies, and history books of the year — our most inviting bridge between past and present, personal and universal.
1. A LIFE WORTH LIVING
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,”
Albert Camus
wrote in his 119-page philosophical essay
The Myth of Sisyphus
in 1942.
“Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”
One of the most famous opening lines of the twentieth century captures one of humanity’s most enduring philosophical challenges — the impulse at the heart of
Seneca’s meditations on life
and
Montaigne’s timeless essays
and
Maya Angelou’s reflections
, and a wealth of human inquiry in between. But Camus, the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature after Rudyard Kipling, addressed it with unparalleled courage of conviction and insight into the irreconcilable longings of the human spirit.
In the beautifully titled and beautifully written
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning
(
public library
|
IndieBound
), historian
Robert Zaretsky
considers Camus’s lifelong quest to shed light on the absurd condition, his “yearning for a meaning or a unity to our lives,” and its timeless yet increasingly timely legacy:
If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest. Our pursuit of meaning, and the consequences should we come up empty-handed, are matters of eternal immediacy.
[…]
Camus pursues the perennial prey of philosophy — the questions of who we are, where and whether we can find meaning, and what we can truly know about ourselves and the world — less with the intention of capturing them than continuing the chase.
Dive deeper with more on
Camus’s crusade for happiness as our moral obligation
.
2. CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?
“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead,”
John Updike wrote in
his magnificent memoir
.
“So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”
It’s a sentiment somewhat easier sugar dating registration Philippines to swallow — though certainly not without its
ancient challenge
— when it comes to our own death, but when that of our reliable sugar dating sites Philippines loved ones skulks around, it’s invariably
devastating and messy
, and it catches us
painfully unprepared
no matter how much time we’ve had to “prepare.”
Count on another beloved
New Yorker
contributor, cartoonist
Roz Chast
, to address this delicate and doleful subject Quezon City sugar baby with equal parts wit and wisdom in
Can’t We Talk filter sugar babies about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
(
public library
|
IndieBound
) — a remarkable illustrated chronicle of her parents’ decline into old age and death, pierced by those profound, strangely uplifting in-between moments of cracking open the little chests of truth we keep latched shut all our lives until a brush with
our mortal impermanence
rattles the lock and lets out some understanding, however brief and fragmentary, of the great human mystery of what it means to live.
The humor and humility with which Chast tackles the enormously difficult subject of aging, illness and death is nothing short of a work of genius.
See more
here
.
3. SUSAN SONTAG
In addition to being a great personal hero of mine,
Susan Sontag
endures as one of the most influential intellectuals of the past century. But her most enchanting quality was a singular blend of
fierce, opinionated intellect
and
vast emotional capacity
— a mind not only aware of the world, but also of itself and its own vulnerability, coupled with a heart that beat with uncommon intensity and inhabited its fallible human potentiality fully, unflinchingly — not only a
“professional observer”
of life, per her memorable definition of a writer, but also an active participant in life, both public and private. Sontag lived with more dimension than most people are capable of even imagining, let alone comprehending, which rendered her at times revered, at times reviled, but mostly artificially flattened into
the very labels she so deplored
.
To capture Sontag’s life and spirit by honoring her dimensionality, then, is a monumental task, but one which Berlin-based writer and art critic
David Schreiber
accomplishes with enormous elegance in the long-awaited
Susan Sontag: A Biography
(
public library
|
IndieBound
).
Perhaps the most interesting narrative thread in Schreiber’s story of Sontag explores how she claimed her place in culture and crafted her version of “the American dream,” beginning with her conquest of New York:
In March 1959, Susan and her son, David, moved to New York. With her typical flair for self-dramatization, Sontag told interviewers that she arrived in the metropolis with only two suitcases and thirty most active sugar baby site Philippines dollars. Later it was seventy dollars, a somewhat more realistic amount that would be about $450 in today’s dollars. Because of the low rents in New York at the time, it would have been enough to make a start.
As Sontag told it, it sounds like a version of the American dream: a twenty-three-year-old single mother without resources moves to a huge and hostile city intending to live there safe sugar dating Philippines as an author, filmmaker, and intellectual. And on her own and against all odds, she realizes her dream. There could not have been a better place than New York for Sontag to convert her fantasy of the bohemian life into reality. In this city, everything seemed possible for a young, ambitious woman.
Portrait of Susan Sontag by Peter Hujar, 1975, from ‘Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.’ Click image for details.
But it wasn’t merely a matter of ambition: Sontag possessed a rare talent to possess — people, places, social situations. Schreiber cites an account by one of Sontag’s lifelong friends, the American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard:
Howard remembers what a natural Sontag was at making new contacts, striking up friendships, and meeting influential people. “She could be very, very nice — even seductive — to people she wanted something from. She just could not talk to stupid people.”
[…]
Sontag’s natural and self-confident contact with this exclusive society is all the more remarkable when one recalls how difficult it was to gain admittance. The gathering of New York’s high society of writers, artists, and intellectuals was an almost hermetically sealed world with strict criteria for admission.
[…]
Sontag seemed to exude an irresistible mixture of intelligence, hipness, sex, and beauty, so that, as she herself once said, she had Jasper Johns, Bobby Kennedy, and Warren Beatty all at her feet.
Dive deeper
here
.
4. MEANWHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO
Although
Meanwhile, in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words
(
public library
|
IndieBound
) by illustrator extraordinaire and
frequent
Brain Pickings
contributor
Wendy MacNaughton
may be “about”
a
city, in the sense that the raw inspiration was drawn from most active sugar dating site Philippines the streets of San Francisco, it is really about
the
city, any city — about community, about subcultures and belonging, about the complexities of gentrification, about what it means to have individual dignity and shared identity. In that sense, it is a collective memoir of community.
Like a modern-day
Margaret Mead
armed with ink and watercolor, not a critic or commentator but an observer and amplifier of voice, MacNaughton plunges into the living fabric of the city with equal parts curiosity and compassion, gentleness and generosity, wit and wisdom, and emerges with a dimensional portrait painted with honesty, humor, and humility.
Beneath the individual stories — of the bus driver, of the hipsters, of the old men in Chinatown, of the librarian, of the street preacher — lies a glimpse of our shared humanity, those most vulnerable and earnest parts of the human soul that we often overlook and dismiss as we reduce people to their demographic and psychographic variables, be those race or gender or socioeconomic status or subcultural identification. Embedded in these simple, moving stories is MacNaughton’s tender reminder that there is no greater gift we can give each other than the gift of understanding, of looking and really seeing, of peering beyond the persona and into the person with an awareness that however different our struggles and circumstances may be, we are inextricably bonded by the great human longing to be truly seen for who we are.
See more
here
.
5. EVER YOURS
Vincent van Gogh
was woven of contradictions — an extraordinary artist who also illuminated
the scientific mysteries of movement and light
; a man of
great hunger for love and light
and a
great capacity for anguish
. Nowhere does the role of these polarizing pulls in the making of his genius shine more brilliantly than in
Ever Yours: The Essential Letters
(
public library
|
IndieBound
) — a revelatory selection of 265 letters exploring Van Gogh’s creative restlessness, his struggle to find his path in life, his tentative first steps into painting, and his views on art, society, love, and life.
In one letter, Van Gogh writes sugar baby membership cost to his brother, Theo:
I’m always inclined to believe that the best way of knowing [the divine] is to love a great deal. Love that friend, that person, sugar dating features comparison that thing, whatever you like, you’ll be on the right path to knowing more thoroughly, afterwards; that’s what I say to myself. But you must love with a high, serious intimate sympathy, with a will, with intelligence, and you must always seek to know more thoroughly, better, and more.
‘Self-Portrait with Straw Hat’ by Vincent van Gogh
In another, he despairs:
In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for; he feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it; what it is he can’t clearly remember,and he has vague ideas and says to himself, “the others are building their nests and making their little ones and raising the brood,” and he bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering. “Look, there’s an idler,” says another passing bird — that fellow’s a sort of man of leisure. And yet the prisoner lives and doesn’t die; nothing of what’s going on within shows outside, he’s in good health, he’s rather cheerful in the sunshine. But then comes the season of migration. A bout of melancholy — but, say the children who look after him, he’s got everything that he needs in his cage, after all — but he looks at the sky outside, heavy with storm clouds, and within himself feels a rebellion against fate. I’m in a cage, I’m in a cage, and so I lack for nothing, you fools! Me, I have everything I need! Ah, for pity’s sake, freedom, to be a bird like other birds!
An idle man like that resembles an idle bird like that.
[…]
You may not always be able to say what it is that confines, that immures, that seems to bury, and yet you feel [the] bars…
Dive deeper with Van Gogh’s
heartfelt sugar dating site fees Philippines letters on his struggle to find his purpose
.
6. THE UNSPEAKABLE
Meghan Daum
is undoubtedly one of the finest essayists of our time. In
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
(
public library
|
IndieBound
), she explores “the tension between primal reactions and public decorum” and aiming at “a larger discussion about the way human experiences too often come with preassigned emotional responses,” driven by a valiant effort to unbridle those messy, complex experiences from the simplistic templates with which we address them, both privately and publicly.
In the introduction, Daum echoes Zadie Smith’s piercing critique of
our platitudes-paved road to self-actualization
and laments the hijacking of our darker, more disquieting emotions by the happiness industrial complex:
For all the lip service we pay to “getting real,” we remain a culture whose discourse is largely rooted in platitudes. We are told — and in turn tell others — that illness and suffering isn’t a ruthless injustice, but a journey of hope. Finding disappointment in places where we’re supposed to find joy isn’t a sign of having different priorities as much as having an insufficiently healthy outlook. We love redemption stories and silver linings. We believe in overcoming adversity, in putting the past behind us, in everyday miracles. We like the idea that everything happens for a reason. When confronted with the suggestion that life is random or that suffering is not always transcendent we’re apt to not only accuse the suggester of rudeness but also pity him for his negative worldview. To reject sentimentality, or even question it, isn’t just uncivilized, it’s practically un-American.
Dive deeper with Daum on
aging, nostalgia, and how we become who we are
.
7. WORN STORIES
One of the most extraordinary things about human beings is that we weave our lives of stories, stories woven of sentimental memories, which we can’t help but attach to our physical environment — from where we walk, creating
emotional place-memory maps of a city
, to how
smell transports us across space and time
, to what we wear.
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