The most recommended aphorism books

In this book, Bakewell describes the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne in, as she writes, one question and twenty attempts at an answer.

Although I spent much of my time during the early 1990s reading philosophy, I read little of Montaigne’s work. I had focused on the writing of the ancient Greeks and, as a result, I had failed to notice the important work of Montaigne. Bakewell’s clever, question-based approach is engaging.

I strongly recommend it, even if you are familiar with philosophy and Montaigne’s abundance of writing.

Academic institutions are competitive environments governed not only by the zest to enrich and transmit knowledge, but also by politics, vanity, and caprices. In many respects, they resemble life at a royal court as described by the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián. His Pocket Oracle is chock-full of advice, in the form of maximally compact yet hauntingly beautifully written maxims, on how to penetrate through the appearance of things. Imbued in the art of discernment of St. Ignatius of Loyola, he repeatedly singles out the essential qualities that make possible successful choices in academic life as well, such as taste, judgment, and an eye for talent. One of his aphorisms (no. 4) is particularly dear to me: scholarship and courage make immortal, because that is what they themselves are.

I have had my copy since about 1972, when I was a penurious post-grad, and it lacks an ISBN, but it is based on a famous phrase that may or may not have been written by Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, and it is an uproarious and undisciplined history of that phrase. Merton calls it a Shandean postscript, because there are parallels with the style of Tristram Shandy.

I am afraid (or so two of my more literate editors have assured me), Merton infected my own style to an extent, but you can just tell that he enjoyed telling a story, almost as though it came from Falstaff himself. Any would-be understander of science needs to read it, but if you cite it, don’t make the mistake of Charlesworth et al., who, in Life Among the Scientists,… show more.

As Cyril Connolly himself writes, "What follows are the doubts and reflections of a year, a word-cycle in three or four rhythms; art, love, nature and religion: an experiment in self dismantling..." This fragmentary method of writing, with quotes, aphorisms, epigrams, allusions, from a litany of great writers, thinkers, and diarists, with sudden reflections on love, the loss of love, spirituality, desire, literature, art, and psychology are the collected musings of Cyril Connolly, first published in 1944 in Horizon, the magazine he was founder and editor for.  My favourite parts of his writing are the plentiful poetic depictions of the scene, usually with the aid of perspicacious and evocative lists, revealing the interior life of the poetic author: "Dead leaves, coffee grounds, grenadine, tabac Maryland, mental expectation - perfumes of the Nord-Sud; autumn arrival at Pigalle..." 

This book is a literary sketch or prayer book, overflowing with ideas and… show more.

In late high-heat summer, I sat reading in the forest-park near our house in our Ontario town. While my daughter played with her friends, I delved into Kafka’s Diaries. Another parent passed by. “What’re you reading?” she asked. “My bible,” I said. “Oh? …Which version?” “Kafka’s,” I said.

I took K.’s book everywhere through the fall. A task. It’s 670 pages, in a large-sized format.
Why Kafka years into the 21st century? There is K.: he’s endured, prevailed in his tragi-absurd precognitions of tyrannical systems. “And yet. No ‘and yet’”, he wrote: his prophetic presence looms over what we do to harm our world and psyches.

He reminds us of the serious undertaking called Writing, and of the necessary accompanying private process, Reading. (Do we need reminding? Maybe, and maybe not.) To K., our trials—to adapt his word—turn us toward experience—its suffering, its muting extravagances—and to exorcising dreams and… show more.

There is no better way to get to know the Vikings than by their own sayings and other contemporary descriptions and stories. This book is a carefully chosen and lively selection of extracts of such sources, from their own rune-stone inscriptions, intriguing poetry and historic writings to English, German and Russian accounts – all set in their context and divided into topics such as ‘All sorts of conditions for men’, ‘Myth, Religion and Superstition’, ‘The Heroic life’ – and ‘The unheroic life’.

This book is a wonderful practical guide to grieving that is accompanied by charming illustrations from the author. This might make it sound child-like or cutsie, but it’s not at all.

It’s an honest and fierce guide that doesn’t use any cheesy aphorisms or simplistic clichés about grief. It tells it like it is, but with kindness and hope. It helped me feel not so alone.

Someone once said that novels were for light summer reading by bourgeois ladies. W.G. Sebald may have shared this opinion. The latter preferred letters, notes, fragments and diaries. Similarly, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born, of Sephardi ancestry, German-speaking and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, only ever wrote one novel. But his aphorisms, both long and short, are remarkable. He unearths forgotten writers, important ones that he had met, and he meditates on literary gossip and the remaining time in his life. Here’s an example: Klaus Mann’s last proposal: a mass suicide of writers (of the great names).

Nietzsche demystifies the idea that the state provides stability and certainty in our lives and, as a result, the concept that is necessary. He has a dialectic between phenomenon and essence, for which the state is the social form that corresponds to the alienation we experience in our everyday life in capitalism. Thus, as a corresponding social form to the mass culture, it reiterates our unfreedom. Nietzsche holds a concept of fetishization that brings him much closer to critical Marxism than previously thought. 

This is a novel about a young man who must decide between pursuing a career in baseball or marrying a woman he loves, the daughter of a midwestern farming family.

The author knows what it’s really like to live on a farm in Iowa, and it shows. His characters fully inhabit that world. Although the story is about one man’s ambition, love, and uncertainties, it’s capacious enough that we all can see ourselves in it.

The story encompasses heartbreak and hope and is written subtly and with insight. It’s the kind of book that keeps you thinking long after you finish it.