Reader's Digest: September 7, 2024

Two book recommendations from my summer reading.

The first is a memoir of crippling insomnia that manages to be funny and harrowing at the same time: Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease.

Along with brutal insights into life without sleep, confusions of genre, and philosophical reflections on science, religion, and love, there is an arresting passage in which Harvey’s anxiety takes the form of external world scepticism, just before her sleeplessness starts:

One evening I was sitting in the pub with my sculpture group, a Wednesday evening; there was conversation which ran along usual lines—the project we were working on, the model we were sculpting, a lament at the state of the world, a rapture at some exhibition someone had seen, garrulous disagreement about what we ought to do next in the class. I was sitting on a stool. I suddenly felt that the whole thing was unreal. It crossed my mind that this scene I found myself in with these people in this pub might be a dream, or a hallucinat…