A Year in Reading: Ayad Akhtar
For this piece, I cribbed from my daily journal to fashion this faintest thread of a pathway through this year’s reading highlights…
JANUARY || Memories, Dreams, Reflections – Carl Jung
Days are short; nights are long. Maybe not more time to dream, but more time to lie in the darkness remembering dreams. Every few years, I pick up this book for which there is no obvious description. An account of the birth of psychoanalysis; an honest and often attempt to make rational sense of the uncanny; my first encounter with a life made sense by an active dream-life. It is no straightforward autobiography. I’ve read the book a half-dozen times now, and each time, I find it richer — though this is my first time revisiting it since finishing Deirdre Bair‘s magisterial biography of the Swiss doctor. The blindspots were never clearer to me, nor the depth of his understanding of life. I suspect I may pick it up again before the year is out.
FEBRUARY || Uncanny Valley: A Memoir – Anna Wiener
Wiener did what most of us do. She gave up her illusions to make a living wage. In the process, she inadvertently found her way back to the very dream that had birthed the.
