The success story of Popova is quite an inspiring one for me. What started as her volunteering act of sending a weekly email to a bunch of her friends about the books she had read and her thoughts about them has now become the famous website and weekly newsletter than thousands visit and subscribe to. It’s an entrepreneurship not of tech but of literature that is made widely available through tech.
Alain de Botton in one of his essay-video on ‘The School of Life’ explained quite pointedly that why so many of us want to writers in this age is due to the ‘pandemic of loneliness’. Because our communication has become so overly digitized and our lives so insolated, we feel more and more unheard and unsolicited; writing then becomes our tool to voice our unheard feelings and thoughts, in hopes that someone might read them and understand us therein.
Nonetheless, writing without an audience of readers is still writing and still sharing – and still a communion. Thinking aloud or expressing oneself to a blank page whether in a diary or on a Word document is in itself cathartic, where one feels heard despite no one listening or reading. This review, and many before it and many after, along with my weekly 5BF articles and other pieces of writing, will go unread and unheard, (not even ‘a bunch of interested friends’ to share with) yet still I write them, for it feels important both outwards and in.
Reading, however, is where it all began for me, and as well, for Popova. In this book, not only has she done justice to all her time spent reading and to all those authors she read, but also, she has intelligently brought them together to create a diverse and compounding picture of life.
Starting with the tragic life of Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who presented the planetary system and with it the New Astronomy, Popova’s book is one long mesmerizing tale of incredible humans with incredible achievements. Maria Mitchell, the first woman astronomer who discovered her own comet; Elizabeth Barret, the lost poetess who wrote a novel in verse about a woman taking on her own journey in the age of dominant patriarchy; Margaret Fuller, an early and undeterred champion of woman’s rights, among many of her other achievement; Harriet Hosmer, a sculptor of genius kind and a lesbian way before the term was used; Emily Dickinson, the eccentric, defiant, and the truly incredible poet; and Rachel Carson, the woman who brought sea, science, and literature together for the general public. Yet all of these big names bring more incredible people into this book with them; like we have the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson in relation to Margaret Fuller and Dickinson’s forevermore love Susan, among many others.
Across 29 chapters, beautifully and thoughtfully titled, all of these geniuses and kind souls, with their ambitions and difficulties, their love lives and their heartaches, come to live through Popova’s eloquent prose and her intelligent thinking. Interwoven and linked, these different stories spanning across centuries and belonging to all kinds of varying sciences and arts, in the end combine to present a picture of life that although consists of these incredible human beings and their uplifting stories, transcends beyond their individuality and personal contributions into a narrative that is humanly divine, reassuring of our indefinite curiosity and courage, and ultimately a deliberate perspective on a passing and evolving life & universe.
Despite its slightly-over feministic approach and a few inconsistencies in its chapter attributions, reading or rather dwelling in Popova’s expansive yet near-to-heart book was a month-long and memorable delight!
Ratings: 5/5 ***** September 10, 2021_