This week’s minimalist reading is sort of mixed a blessing: in L'art de la simplicité – How to live more with less, Dominique Loreau introduces different ideas of minimalism from ‘Oriental’ (as she calls it), European, and American backgrounds. Born in France, she lived in England and the US and traveled through Canada, Mexico, and
We drown out the big questions by marching behind the brass band of infinite ambition. It’s a march that apparently need never end: today’s idea of success increasingly involves attaining unprecedented levels of health, power, and celebrity. —John Naish Enough. Breaking Free from the World of Excess This quote is from 2008. It resonates with
What the blurb says: So overwhelmed was Marie de Gournay by the work of French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne that when she finally met him, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. An awkward, obsessive character, she set herself against the world in
Leo had been avoiding his wife, Victoria, who was barely speaking to him and his sister Beatrice who wouldn't stop speaking to him—rambling on and on about getting together for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. In July. Leo hadn't spent a holiday with his family in twenty years, since the mid-'90s if he was remembering correctly: he wasn't
"I have to keep convincing myself", Helen said when they got outside, "that this is really happening. You're all so matter-of-fact about it, but the truth is that he is dying in there and I have to go and tell my mother." Helen's beloved little brother is dying. This brings the family together again
What the blurb says: "William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet, as years