OptionalBooks

I'd rather be lonely than with this book

Terrible. I got this because it was a footnote in the excellent Arcadia. I was hoping for some insights into loneliness as a concept, what it means for us today, and how we (can) deal with it.

All these topics do appear in chapter headings, but the chapter content does not really provide answers. The author seems scared to say anything in his own words and instead cites philosophers, poets, films and TV shows. Working with citations obviously is not the problem, and working with fiction as examples or to define terms is actually a thing I enjoy immensely, but the author should do more to guide us between these different voices and provide should some own commentary. In the end it reads more like one of those conspiracy cork boards with red string than a book: “What's loneliness? The protagonist of Taxi Driver describes his loneliness like this, Nietzsche says that and Kant says that. Let's talk about Social Media. Here's a poem and here's a quote by some philosopher. Next topic.”

When the author does provide some of his own words it's to over-explain every little concept with two examples each. Some basic ideas are even explained multiple times in different chapters bloating this book to probably double the size it could be—and it's still just 140 pages excluding references and end-notes!

My last gripe with this book was that it gendered in every way possible: It uses a generic “he”, sometimes a “he or she”, once a “s/he” and a couple times “they”. Any one of these would have been better than to mix them all throughout!

Overall, no fun at all to get through, while also not providing any great insights. You'd be better off reading the opening four paragraphs of the Loneliness Wikipedia page. I wrote that as somewhat of a joke, but I just checked It's actually got 95% of the facts that I took from the book.

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