Existentialism revisited

I plan to spend 2024 delving deeper into existentialism. While I am somewhat familiar with the general concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology, the existence of God in Kierkegaard’s existentialism, and Camus’s absurdism, I have yet to fully immerse myself in their works. This year, I am challenging myself to understand more about the principle that existence precedes essence. To help in this journey, I have chosen to read At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell, having enjoyed reading book below (How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne) by her last year.

How to Live

Recently, I have started to read How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. For anyone interested, here are the 20 themes discussed in the book: 

Don't worry about death;
Pay attention;

Be born;
Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted;
Survive love and loss;
Use little tricks;
Question everything;
Keep a private room behind the shop;
Be convivial: live with others;
Wake from the sleep of habit;
Live temperately;
Guard your humanity;
Do something no one has done before;
See the world;
Do a good job, but not too good a job;
Philosophize only by accident;
Reflect on everything; regret nothing;
Give up control;
Be ordinary and imperfect;
Let life be its own answer.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I just finished reading Trust, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction by Hernan Diaz. The novel begins in New York City in 1927 and ends in 1938, chronicling the collective experience of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The book explores themes such as class, power, and money, and how they can be used to control the truth, thereby controlling the narrative. Here is an excellent review of the book by The Atlantic.