Don't know if this book is fun in a serious sort of way, or serious in a funny sort of way. There is an emerging genre of autobiography by harvesting the insights from a lifetime of reading. Rick Gekoski is an academic, a litrerary critic, a bookseller and collector, and other things besides. He writes with honesty, humour and is good at choosing the things to say about what he has read, and why it mattered. Here is one of his comments on his philosophical phase as a post-grad student, when he read widely in philosophy, symbolic logic, ethics and aesthetics. He realised that he had become intellectually arrogant, argumentative, aggressive and was merely fashioning tools to mask his failings and attack others. The sin of cleverness as a weapon.
"I honed my analytic skills. Honing is a dangerous metaphor here, for in general we are rightly anxious about immature people with knives. You can sharpen a scalpel or butcher's knife, and achieve marvels of accurate surgery upon the living or the dead. But offer a knife - even worse a badly honed one - to someone without skills or the sense to know how to use it, and a lot of misdirected slashing is likely to result." (page 74)
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