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adamlauver's reviews
300 reviews
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
4.0
reading this book made me feel like i'm not doing nearly enough with my onlyfans
The Silence by Don DeLillo
challenging
1.0
if this weren't so short I would have DNF'd it for sure. just didn't do it for me in the slightest. frankly I'm relieved to be done with it.
Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems by Louise Glück
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
4.0
"I felt / something true had been spoken / and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself / I was glad at least to have heard it."
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Some really evocative bits threaded together a bit too opaquely and meanderingly for me to fully connect with. Love the idea of putting essays and poems in conversation with one another, though. Worth powering through the density for the nuggets that are there for sure.
The Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
3.0
Some interesting ideas here that actually rekindled my appreciation for what religion in its purest form can really mean--i.e., acknowledging one's own frailties and humbling oneself before something greater. But Kierkegaard fails to make a truly convincing defense of Christianity (indeed, claims that to defend Christianity is foolish--which is true to an extent, but is a real hamper on dialogue), relying on a whole array of unexamined presuppositions and occasionally baffling lines of reasoning rooted in a lexicon that he concocts yet does not fully explain, leaving his whole system to be at best madly ambiguous and at worst untenable.
Kierkegaard makes a big deal about how a spiritual "physician" has a more objective view of the spirit than everyone else, which is why true Christianity (the physician) is authorized to speak of it. That's all fine and good, but anyone can call themselves a physician--what's the metric by which one determines who is and is not a qualified arbiter of spiritual realities? Kierkegaard doesn't discuss this at all. Similarly, he celebrates the fact that Christianity does not require comprehension, only belief--he hails this as a great virtue, and yet if I were to apply that same metric to any other religion or, worst, mindless cult, I could achieve the same result: a comfortable self-assurance in my own beliefs regardless of how much sense they make, with absolutely no need for dialogue or corroboration. I see his point--it's faith, after all, and faith must be, well, taken on faith--but he doesn't offer any way to distinguish between healthy faith in what's true and dangerous faith in what's false. He merely begs the question that he has already answered for himself.
Other contentions I had with the text: 1) Near the end he emphasizes the Christian notion of "thou shalt" or "you shall"--I found myself wondering about good ole' "timshel," "thou mayest"; where does that fit into Kierkegaard's framework?; 2) He refers several times to the idea that the individual human being constitutes more than the human species, that "it is a perfection to be the single individual"; really his entire framework depends upon this notion of the individual individually sinning and being individually judged before God--and yet this obviously isn't the whole picture. As another reviewer on Goodreads, Kate Maver, points out, "we are socio-historical animals who swim in relationships and in cultures built on generations upon generations of relationships, and even the Christian faith that he parses, analyzes and ascribes would be nothing without its social fabric." Kierkegaard ignores the basic truth that inasmuch as we are separate we are also all connected; there are two sides to that coin, and he ignores one side of it completely--perhaps because if he actually acknowledged the myriad of interconnectedness it would be a lot less easy to assert 100% individual responsibility for one's personal reality, a reality that is never entirely in our hands but is affected by the hands of every person we ever come in contact with; and 3) Probably the most irresponsible thing Kierkegaard does in the book is condemn uncertainty; he argues that when someone says they're not sure or that they don't/can't know the truth about God or Jesus, that they're somehow "pretentiously" ignoring God. But how is admitting uncertainty more pretentious than feigning the opposite?
All of that being said, I do realize his main point would probably still hold; that even in the face of all that aforementioned interconnectedness and the many ways in which one's life has perhaps been somewhat "determined" by its surrounding circumstances, etc... that it's still that single individual's responsibility to, well, take responsibility for his spiritual being and choose right over wrong, faith over sin, transparency-in-God over despair, etc. I just think the human condition is so much more complicated than what Kierkegaard puts forth; I think his philosophy is too Christocentric to accommodate the real complexities of human life--which is a shame, because there really is a lot of good stuff in it. For example, I love when he gets downright sarcastic about things--it's not often that I get to laugh out loud at a book about despair.
Overall: a decent read, probably an essential one, but a bit too narrow-minded to really be life-altering for anyone who's not already a Christian.
Kierkegaard makes a big deal about how a spiritual "physician" has a more objective view of the spirit than everyone else, which is why true Christianity (the physician) is authorized to speak of it. That's all fine and good, but anyone can call themselves a physician--what's the metric by which one determines who is and is not a qualified arbiter of spiritual realities? Kierkegaard doesn't discuss this at all. Similarly, he celebrates the fact that Christianity does not require comprehension, only belief--he hails this as a great virtue, and yet if I were to apply that same metric to any other religion or, worst, mindless cult, I could achieve the same result: a comfortable self-assurance in my own beliefs regardless of how much sense they make, with absolutely no need for dialogue or corroboration. I see his point--it's faith, after all, and faith must be, well, taken on faith--but he doesn't offer any way to distinguish between healthy faith in what's true and dangerous faith in what's false. He merely begs the question that he has already answered for himself.
Other contentions I had with the text: 1) Near the end he emphasizes the Christian notion of "thou shalt" or "you shall"--I found myself wondering about good ole' "timshel," "thou mayest"; where does that fit into Kierkegaard's framework?; 2) He refers several times to the idea that the individual human being constitutes more than the human species, that "it is a perfection to be the single individual"; really his entire framework depends upon this notion of the individual individually sinning and being individually judged before God--and yet this obviously isn't the whole picture. As another reviewer on Goodreads, Kate Maver, points out, "we are socio-historical animals who swim in relationships and in cultures built on generations upon generations of relationships, and even the Christian faith that he parses, analyzes and ascribes would be nothing without its social fabric." Kierkegaard ignores the basic truth that inasmuch as we are separate we are also all connected; there are two sides to that coin, and he ignores one side of it completely--perhaps because if he actually acknowledged the myriad of interconnectedness it would be a lot less easy to assert 100% individual responsibility for one's personal reality, a reality that is never entirely in our hands but is affected by the hands of every person we ever come in contact with; and 3) Probably the most irresponsible thing Kierkegaard does in the book is condemn uncertainty; he argues that when someone says they're not sure or that they don't/can't know the truth about God or Jesus, that they're somehow "pretentiously" ignoring God. But how is admitting uncertainty more pretentious than feigning the opposite?
All of that being said, I do realize his main point would probably still hold; that even in the face of all that aforementioned interconnectedness and the many ways in which one's life has perhaps been somewhat "determined" by its surrounding circumstances, etc... that it's still that single individual's responsibility to, well, take responsibility for his spiritual being and choose right over wrong, faith over sin, transparency-in-God over despair, etc. I just think the human condition is so much more complicated than what Kierkegaard puts forth; I think his philosophy is too Christocentric to accommodate the real complexities of human life--which is a shame, because there really is a lot of good stuff in it. For example, I love when he gets downright sarcastic about things--it's not often that I get to laugh out loud at a book about despair.
Overall: a decent read, probably an essential one, but a bit too narrow-minded to really be life-altering for anyone who's not already a Christian.