98 books like A Personal Matter

I love Stein’s unapologetic and brazen queerness at a time when that was not exactly appreciated. Toklas was Stein’s lifelong lover, with whom she shared her life in Paris.

To me, this book feels like a love letter. My favorite scene is the one in which Toklas and Stein invite the struggling artists of Paris to dinner and then sit them opposite paintings they themselves have made in order to keep them from arguing. Stein’s wit is as lively as ever in this book, and–it’s simply the best example of a hoax autobiography I can think of. And it certainly puts paid to any notion that an autobiographical text might be stable or even a little truthy.

Words do marvelous things as they emerge out of Stein’s brilliant mind. 

I read this book in a few sittings. That’s how hooked it had me. There’s something about the delicacy and complexity of the relationship between the two protagonists that makes this book stand out. I love the book for this. I felt connected to the characters, invested in their future, and even furious at their inability to make things work at times (they were made for each other!). Their insecurities and feelings of inadequacy are so relatable yet so often not talked about.

I loved the way the book explores deeper male emotions and the pressure felt by men in a world where talking about feelings has historically been seen as a weakness. Lastly, I love it because it is lyrical, melancholic, hopeful, and real. All of that is what life is. 

Crusoe is a failed slaver, a reckless son, a bad sailor, a pretty crap boss, a parrot lover and, in all of that, he shows us how damaged and imperfect a system we have inherited.

I love Robinson Crusoe for its audacity. When it was first published in 1719, readers were furious to discover that there was no such person as Crusoe but that, instead, the story was fabricated by one Daniel Defoe, who had recently spent three days in the stockades for seditious libel. I love the insanity of this story, how it wants us to believe that a man spends 28 years on a deserted island and still comes home to England richer than when he left. A flawed novel but our first in English, it is also our first autofiction. 

I set out very determined to despise this first book of Knausgard’s series. Knausgard’s life is no more fascinating than anyone’s. This is not necessarily his life but some reasonable facsimile that dips in and out of reverie, philosophy, and the hardcore reality of cleaning up after an alcoholic parent dies. Hoarding, self-loathing, and Nordic landscape are all features. I mean, what is NOT to love about that?

My lust for this book is not so much what it is about, though,  as how it does this thing of drawing me along in its unadorned vocabulary to wholesale belief in everything that is put down. It is a supreme hoax that I am grateful to have encountered. 

I doubt that there is any American who can look at our country over the past four or five years and conclude that the ship is running smoothly.

Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from the 1950s, is the first historian to really put his finger on what makes America tick. He sees a clear relationship between concern over Status (and one could include race), anxiety, paranoia, irrational fear, and the evolution of politics. 

And while the book is not quite as pessimistic as the title might seem, I wonder what he would say about the country’s status today? Are we as a nation really committed to democracy? It would seem that a considerable percentage of people are not. Those same people seem to promote violence.

And has not the massive increase in shootings been a major factor in increasing our anxiety, and paranoia? Such an increase in those concerns has… show more.

In a vain effort to prevent the disaster they knew was coming, Russia’s leading religious philosophers in 1909 called on the increasingly radical Russian intelligentsia to return to religion as a means of grounding the individual. The philosopher, Nikolai Beryaev wrote that the intelligentsia sought a universal theory but was only ready to accept one that supported their social goals. They, therefore, denied man’s absolute significance. Bogdan Kistyakovsky wrote that the intelligentsia’s attraction to formalism and bureaucracy as well as its faith in the omnipotence of rules contained the seeds of a future police state. The authors of the various essays in this classic book, in fact, foresaw all of the characteristics of the future Soviet police state that arose out of the drive of Russian radicals to create “heaven on earth.”

I stumbled upon this 100-year-old book during my research for my upcoming book. Seldes proved to be the exact type of irascible storyteller I needed to read to frame my work. He is irreverent, lyrical, and highly opinionated! Seldes is a self-proclaimed (maybe the first) pop culture critic who turned his finely honed intellect to profiling the religious seers and conmen of the first two decades of the United States.

The Stammering Century set the template for the newly minted genre of author—the ‘public intellectual.’ Seldes weaves disparate first-person accounts and his own ideas about how religion in America twists and turns to become something entirely new and not always welcomed. This edition features a delightful essay by noted cultural historian, Greil Marcus that inspires us to read history not just as a series of dates but as a wildly entertaining and oft-times accidental series of bad ideas.

Reading Hofstadter’s essays can be an eerie experience. Yes, he was writing in the early 1960s, and often about historical phenomena (although the recent antics and influence of Senator McCarthy were clearly at the front of his mind). But many of his observations about status anxiety and conspiracy theories feel spookily relevant today. With typical eloquence, Hofstadter wrote that McCarthy was buoyed by Americans who were revolting against the “tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament”; I saw something similar in fascist sympathizers in the interwar years. This edition contains both of Hofstadter’s famous essays on “anti-intellectualism” and “the paranoid style,” along with fifteen other essays. 

As a Russian Jew and Russian-speaker by birth, a witness of the Russian Revolution, a historian of ideas by vocation, and a consummate prose-writer, Berlin was able to extract the pith of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and present it in English as no one else has before or since. Belinsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and others come to life in these ten essays and speak to us and our concerns today in Berlin’s ventriloquistic tours de force.

In particular, Herzen’s passionate denunciation of political extremism plays a central role, and provides a moral underpinning for Berlin’s commitment to liberty. The book is a major contribution to the explanation of Russia to the West, and the reader is left in no doubt about the relevance and power of the ideas that Berlin illuminates.

The Metaphysical Club is about the Pragmatist philosophers: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. This sounds forbidding, but it’s anything but. Group biography shows how and why particular ideas occur to particular people at a particular moment, and this is a brilliant example of it.