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A review by debi_g
We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider
5.0
This book instantly usurped the position of Debi's #1 Recommended Must-Read in the category of non-fiction. What it was previously, I can no longer recall. What matters is that We Learn Nothing is easy to embrace; a cousin to galvanizing essay collections by David Foster Wallace and Bill Bryson; in spite of its often deprecatory, introspective bent and veracious, temporal sermonizing, the book is actually sanguine.
Throughout his deliberate, rambling prose, Kreider concocts the most breezily exacting, apropos figurative language I've ever encountered. The tome is peppered with sublime, unexpected statements as simple as describing a welling of positive emotion as "the opposite of heartbroken," as trope and true as "a black-comic fiasco out of a Coen Brothers film," and as extended and avant garde as a "frustration pencil" serving to symbolize a repair for defriending. (There are better examples than these, it's just that I underlined so much and since I'm not writing a formal report, I feel at liberty to laze.)
Many of Kreider's topics strike a resonant note, but "Sister World" will stick with me the longest. It's vulnerable approach compels me to find or try to write a yin piece about the quirks, scars, and salves of estrangement from family.
Ordinarily, I'd concluded by sharing a smattering of cherished, ponderable, I-sooo-related-to-this quotations, but
A. there are far too many
B. it's best to discover them in context
because: Kreider.
Okay, okay, maybe just one. "The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control."
Throughout his deliberate, rambling prose, Kreider concocts the most breezily exacting, apropos figurative language I've ever encountered. The tome is peppered with sublime, unexpected statements as simple as describing a welling of positive emotion as "the opposite of heartbroken," as trope and true as "a black-comic fiasco out of a Coen Brothers film," and as extended and avant garde as a "frustration pencil" serving to symbolize a repair for defriending. (There are better examples than these, it's just that I underlined so much and since I'm not writing a formal report, I feel at liberty to laze.)
Many of Kreider's topics strike a resonant note, but "Sister World" will stick with me the longest. It's vulnerable approach compels me to find or try to write a yin piece about the quirks, scars, and salves of estrangement from family.
Ordinarily, I'd concluded by sharing a smattering of cherished, ponderable, I-sooo-related-to-this quotations, but
A. there are far too many
B. it's best to discover them in context
because: Kreider.
Okay, okay, maybe just one. "The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control."