What We’re Reading
The disease of living too fast
“Neurasthenia … took [the] age-old problems of happiness and comfort and medicalized them.”
📚 Neurasthenic Nation, by David Schuster
📚 American Nervousness, 1903, by Tom Lutz
📚 Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, by S. Weir Mitchell
Why Mohsin Hamid exercises, then writes
“My head cleared. My energy soared. My neck pains diminished. Sometimes I texted myself ideas, sentences, entire paragraphs as I walked. Other times I just floated along, arms at my sides, stewing and filtering and looking.”
📚 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
📚 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid
What Ibram X. Kendi learned from cancer
“My focus on writing … was perhaps my way of coping with the demoralizing severity of the cancer and the overwhelming discomfort of the treatment, furiously writing and fighting, fighting and writing to heal mind and body, to heal society.”
📚 How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
Gandhi’s vision of equality involved raw food
“Instead of equating cooking with civilization, he believed that raw food could make humanity more civilized.”
📚 An excerpt from Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet, by Nico Slate
Your body is a teeming battleground
“Barbara Ehrenreich … argues that what ‘makes death such an intolerable prospect’ is our belief in a reductionist science that promises something it cannot deliver—ultimate control over our bodies.”
📚 Natural Causes, by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Reference Desk
Write to the Books Briefing team at booksbriefing@theatlantic.com or reply directly to this email with any of your reading-related dilemmas. We might feature one of your questions in a future edition of the Books Briefing and offer a few books or related Atlantic pieces that might help you out.
About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. She just finished Red Clocks, by Leni Zumas.
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