David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010, Amazon)
I started reading Reality Hunger on the Kindle sample because all the other cool kids are reading it and it
- is a set of 600 pithy lists and bite-size chunks about information
- is a think-aloud blog in book form for the blog-resistant
- activates the same warm lightbulb in your brain as does Nietzsche's aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil and Wittgenstein's fragment books
- would be better with bullet points but I get and utilize myself the cram together heft of semicolon abuse
- might be the perfect iPhone, lemme-read-something-for-just-a-second book
- makes me a little jealous that I didn't do this myself
- is designed to make you jealous that you didn't do it yourself
- is not as sexy as that Padgett Powell book made entirely out of questions
- is not as sexy partly because Powell isn't completely against his book being a novel
- is something else
- is more a manifest than it is a manifesto
- will blow the mind of impressionable undergrads
- is the kind of book that makes you want to outdo it when reviewing it
- has value because of that alone.
I still need to do a proper post on the book, but my first impressions are very much the same as what you drew in just a few pages.
ReplyDeleteYou have hipped me to the Padgett Powell book. It doesn't seem familiar.