Packing My Library - by Patrick Nathan
patricknathan.substack.com · 2,273 words · saved by 1 readers
What I want from my shelves, as I pack them up, is criticism. Here are a few of my favorites.
I am packing my library. Yes, I am. But unlike Benjamin — a “genuine collector” whose passion “borders on the chaos of memories,” as his famous essay has it — my books form what Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call a “working library”: a private system of easily retrievable information, notes, impressions, and experiences. Arranged by author, each book is its own file folder: articles from 2015 and 2016, as we careened toward the presidential election, clipped and folded into Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism; an editor’s note from Hanya Yanagihara about curating a magazine hidden away in…
related reading
- Some ways of looking at booksphilocrumbs.substack.com
- I like 'em thickexperimental-history.com
- Bookshelf · Patrick Collisonpatrickcollison.com
- I Want a Critic | Andrea Long Chu, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Booksnybooks.com
- I like 'em thickexperimental-history.com
- Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books - Ness Labsnesslabs.com
- Calvinojfki.fu-berlin.de
- A Harvard undergraduate assesses his unfinished worksharvardmagazine.com
- Good Reading, Good Thinking, Good Writingsubstack.com
- Nabeel S. Qureshi | Substacknabeelqu.substack.com
- Literary Hub >> The Pleasures of Tsundoku, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book Pileslithub.com
- The War on Geniusrosselliotbarkan.com