naleagdeco's review

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4.0

Found this book randomly, who knows where. Didn't know what it was about.

It was a pleasant read. It was a bit of an inside into the professional writers' mind (with a few different axes, of different genders and sexualities and some discussion of religion and immigrantness) from a place of vulnerability, so it was really about two panels' worth of people's mindsets.

As someone who tried and failed to be a humanities graduate student, it was comforting and enlightening to read their thought processes, to see the kinds of people who thrive or at least qualify for that kind of environment, and see what it gives you (in character, if not in monetary value) and to catch a little glimpse of how people ricochet off literary culture to work towards it as a vocation (and for myself, an immigrant whose family did not come from a literary or academic background, to see the kinds of things I had no awareness of and thus no foothold into that world even from an immigrant standpoint.

A good short read, a good window into the writer's world.

whats_margaret_reading's review

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5.0

You know those times when you somewhat regret your choices in college? Maybe because you finally have some distance between you and that experience?

Well, even without a whole lot of regrets, this series of conversation transcripts of writers (or other people in the publishing/humanities professions) is amazingly interesting. It surrounds a lot of regrets about what they read when, or now that they are older what they would change if they could. It's a really interesting premise, and I loved snooping in other people's lives.

georges's review

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4.0

I am filled with light hope that discussions like these are happening.

pyrrhicspondee's review

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3.0

I'm really glad I read "No Regrets" first. This book frustrated me b/c it started out with a bunch of dudes squeeing over Henry Miller, so . . . no thanks, I'll read some women on the canon instead. But the very thing that "No Regrets" is missing at the end--critical thought on the importance of class and economic privilege--"What We Should Have Known" spends tons of time discussing.

Most helpful to me in here was a discussion of what it felt like to find a book that helped create an intellectual structure for understanding all kinds of other books. For most of these writers, those books tended to be Marxist histories. I've been thinking a lot about the old saw that "first you learn to read and then you read to learn." And perhaps we need a third step that characterizes how for the first decade or two of being a person who reads to learn you will find your brain collecting ideas but not having the necessary context to connect them. Until you find that structure that can connect the dots--probably by reading a book--and suddenly everything you read becomes part of this greater understanding of how culture and people work with and against each other in interconnected webs of thought and art and theory. So, "first you learn to read, then you read to learn. Then, one day, all the things you've learned from reading will come together in a unified theory of the world." (That was not graceful, but whatever. Hopefully you see where I'm going.)

usedtotheweather's review

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4.0

some of the books mentioned as important are already on my to read list (Hobsbawm, mostly); some gentle regrets and suggestions that match up with my own frustrations with academe and knowledge, but not totally hopeless.

shehab's review

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3.0

Fun little plane read that will result in many 'canonical' books to be added to want-to-read shelves especially for us non liberal arts people.
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