33 Books on How to Live: My Reading List for the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilization. When Privacy Is Theft by Margaret Atwood. The Circle by Dave Eggers Knopf/McSweeney’s, 491 pp., $27.95 The Circle is Dave Eggers’s tenth work of fiction, and a fascinating item it is. Eggers’s first major book was the much-acclaimed semifictional memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which recounts the struggles of Eggers to raise his younger brother after the death of their parents.
By that time he was already active in the underground worlds of comic strip writing, small-magazine founding, and columnizing in the then-embryonic realm of online magazines. Then there’s the writing: the screenplays, the journalism, and, of course, the books. The outpouring of ideas is central to The Circle, as it is in part a novel of ideas. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to probe the effects of different kinds of media on our collective consciousness with The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).
“MaeDay. Mae wasn’t so sure about the name, and couldn’t remember a holiday by that name. Clever Mr. Fictional accounts of therapy - media film talk. The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions. By Maria Popova “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation.
Dream images are the product of that creation.” For the past half-century, sleep researcher Rosalind D. Cartwright has produced some of the most compelling and influential work in the field, enlisting modern science in revising and expanding the theories of Jung and Freud about the role of sleep and dreams in our lives. In The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives (public library), Cartwright offers an absorbing history of sleep research, at once revealing how far we’ve come in understanding this vital third of our lives and how much still remains outside our grasp. One particularly fascinating aspect of her research deals with dreaming as a mechanism for regulating negative emotion and the relationship between REM sleep and depression:
Reads: A Virtual Bookshelf. Ten Free Criterion Collection Films to Watch This Weekend. Word is out that Hulu is making all of its Criterion streaming titles available for free this President’s Day weekend (now through February 18th)—about seven hundred films.
The folks at Criterion have their own suggestion where to start: Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless.” It would be hard to disagree: that’s where I started with movies, at the age of seventeen. It’s also where the modern cinema started, and that this very fact is why that movie, and not some other, is the one that made me care, passionately and enduringly, about the art. Life being what it is, I won’t have lots of free time on my hands this weekend. If I did, here’s what I’d be most impatient to watch. “A King in New York” “To Be or Not to Be” Ernst Lubitsch takes on Hitler in this comic view, from 1942, of the serious business of the Polish resistance to German occupation. “Le Bonheur” James Wood's Books of the Year. An end-of-year bouquet like this one offers a chance to pick some flowers that I didn’t get to this year.
So in addition to re-recommending some of the fiction I reviewed in the last twelve months (namely, Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the Bodies,” Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be? ,” Edward St. Aubyn’s “At Last,” and Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”), I want to mention two books of fiction that I wish I had written about. The first is “Four New Messages” (Graywolf Press), a collection of stories by Joshua Cohen. These were a revelation. I didn’t have to wait long, because Cohen, who can apparently write about anything, isn’t waiting to be read. I was excited to read this young writer, and uncalmly await more. The second work of fiction that stood out was Zadie Smith’s “NW” (The Penguin Press).
I also loved Karl Ove Knausgaard’s book “My Struggle” (Archipelago), which I reviewed at length in the magazine. Above all, death. Illustration by Seymour Chwast.