300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love these little huge sentences. It’s a perfect collection of aphorisms for a 40-year-old “privileged” American which is not to say without our own particular type of despair.

"There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you."




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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's a lot of Stoicism, which I enjoyed because it strangely resembles Buddhism- and I like both. There were some great thoughts about coping with the idea of death, which he revisited throughout the book. There's also a lot of Marcus Aurelius's Hellenic religion, which I thought was really interesting because his relationship to paganism is so similar to the relationship a lot of Christians have with Christianity.

There was a lot of repetition which I enjoyed less, and at certain point, I started to lose some interest in his aphorisms. This might be my fault for reading this over five days, instead of just reading a few meditations a day for a longer period of time (as my husband suggested).

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The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is not like Taleb's other three "Incerto" books. This is a book of aphorisms. Initially, I had a negative reaction to this because I was expecting a book like Taleb's other books about predictions and random events. I think I also had a negative reaction because I'm mostly familiar with Buddhist aphorisms (and not with the classical Greek ones Taleb cites), and Taleb's attempt to write a book of aphorisms seemed arrogant.

But then I actually read them, and they're pretty good, and they fill the need for aphorisms for the modern increasingly complex world. It's a really short book so you can read it quickly, but more likely you need to think about most of the sentences for longer than you otherwise would. This might even require a rereading.

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