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60 Weeks 60 Books

60 Weeks 60 Books

Zeba Clarke
Arts, Society & Culture

In about 60 weeks, I am going to hit 60 years. That’s a big number. It makes you think about what you have done, where you have been, what matters to you. My greatest passion has always been reading, whether that was listening to people read to me, or once I grasped the essentials, reading myself. So this year, I am going to talk about 60 books. I have chosen most of the books already, ten for each decade of my life. Some are classics, some are anything but classic, but I chose them because they shaped me in some way, had some form of lasting impact, and in many cases, are regular re-reads. I hope this will amuse, inspire and entertain you. 

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60 - Week 60 The Usefulness of the Useless
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  • 60 - Week 60 The Usefulness of the Useless

    This book was inspiring enough to make me try my hand at my first YouTube book review. And rereading it made me angrier than ever about the way our world is going: the materialism, the populism, the trivialisation and banality, the excessive worship of money and hectoring charlatans. I could go on, but I urge you instead to read Ordine's book which is an impassioned plea to preserve what is best and wisest about us puny humans.

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    Sun, 24 Mar 2024 - 17min
  • 59 - Week 59: Aristotle's Way

    The penultimate book of this series dates from 2018, but I am still urging it on friends and students for the bridge it provides to timeless ideas. Edith Hall is an eminent academic specialising primarily in Greek theatre, but here explored her devotion to Aristotle despite his less than complimentary approach to women. His ideas about self-knowledge, values and virtues, and of course, about the theatre still resonate, and Edith Hall is a helpful and lucid guide to his thinking.

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    Sun, 17 Mar 2024 - 15min
  • 58 - Week 58: Shahnameh The Book of Kings

    This week, a big fat book full of wonderful stories, dragons, magical birds and super-strong heroes with equally powerful horses. One of the books that makes me think that in school, we really ought to be teaching myth and legend from across the world - there would be enough to keep us busy for all 15 years of formal school.

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    Sun, 10 Mar 2024 - 19min
  • 57 - Week 57: The Faraway Nearby

    For this week, I almost chose another book, but then I could not - Solnit's exploration of ice, of Arctic Dreams, the subject of one my own earlier podcasts, of Frankenstein and her account of her stay in the Library of Water on an Icelandic peninsula are so compelling, that I found myself reading and rereading.

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    Sun, 03 Mar 2024 - 17min
  • 56 - Week 56 Collected Prose, Elizabeth Bishop

    Elizabeth Bishop's artistic reputation and legacy seem, rightly, to grow and grow. She won a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1950s, and was a challenging teacher of writing and literature at Harvard and MIT. She died of a brain aneurysm at 68 in 1979, no doubt a product of the booze and fags she packed away during the course of her life. She was also intrepid, insatiably curious about the world around her, and one of the most perceptive observers of all that it is to be a human. The more I read about her and by her, the more I want to read, but there is a limited palette - a relatively slim collected poetry, a thicker, richer collected prose, all driven by an eye at once objective and tender in its delineation of who and what we humans are.

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    Sun, 25 Feb 2024 - 17min
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