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I highly recommend William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, then reading Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al. As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immed
by niels_olson 12y ago
I highly recommend William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, then reading Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al.
As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immediately after listening to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. It was like reading about a disease and then the treatment. Recommend, would do again.
- niels_olson 12y agoAlso, the meditations are available on LibreVox.
- teddyh 12y agoLink: https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/ https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/
- jacobolus 12y agoI’d recommend skipping Irvine’s book and just going straight to the sources. I didn’t feel like he added much, and thought his book was poorly structured and overly didactic; too close to the style of the popular self-help book for my taste. I also felt like he projected many of his own opinions/conclusions back on the authors he was discussing. Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level though: I’m pretty sensitive to bland fuzzy writing.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jedc 12y agoI disagree. I thought that his book framed the larger issues of stoicism well, so I could better understand the source material as the next step. (Particularly since some of the translations use language that's not particularly accessible).
- sfgc 12y agoI agree completely. The subject matter in the book is worth review but I found his style so distracting it was difficult to finish. It has the feel of a first writing assignment where the suggested format was followed very closely chapter after chapter. Not a book you get lost in reading.
- dome82 12y agoMy first book about Stoicism and I loved it. Read it multiple times afterwards!!