Missing Out, by Adam Phillips
Nominally about the alternative lives we might have lived
Two very dear people recommended this author and book to me over the years, on a topic I'm obviously obsessed with. I didn't really get the book,* and would write more about that but found this review which I think captures my view of the book better than I could -- it's a little more generous and positive than I might have been, but I wonder if the author is partly being polite and generous in his public framing:
https://slate.com/culture/2013/02/adam-phillips-missing-out-reviewed.html
So that's that.
Instead, let me link to one of my all-time-favourite book-thoughts, all about alternative lives:
[[The Flat Share, by Beth O'Leary]]
(Something I think about intermittently is spaced repetition for reading -- wouldn't it be better if, instead of reading a lot of forgettable junk, I re-read the same few essays at spaced repetition intervals so they actually stuck in my mind? Maybe I could do that with book-thoughts, I don't know. I think I often find myself quoting my previous thoughts, so maybe in a sense I'm already doing this.)
((Maybe this is why it's fun to read a single writer/thinker/essayist sending out thoughts over time!, even if they don't explicitly quote themselves they tend to come back to the same few themes -- Matt Levine comes to mind for me, he has a few perspectives/claims he keeps coming back to, just applying them to slightly different specific cases over time. So the Matt Levine Mindset gets reinforced in my mind over time, in a way that doesn't happen for books which I spend 10 hours with over a couple of weeks and then never pick up again.))
(((This all sounds very obvious now and so I'm sure someone else has said it, if you can tell me who I'd appreciate it. Possibly one of you!, in which case I stole it, in which case I'm sorry, or not-sorry if you enjoy having your view reinforced for people....)))
* which, incidentally, contains a long section about not-getting things, but I can't tell you what that section actually says, only that it's about not getting things. This is basically my problem with Phillips, his sentences are gorgeous but I truly can't ever figure out what his point is. Anyway, the review linked above gets at that well