One-Way Street

Book #13 for this year. I am well out of the habit of reading non-fiction… which, to be sure, is mostly because I’m not reading much in general (that reading slump persists) but also most of what I am reading is fiction. So a couple of considerations drove me towards this: one of my favourite Youtubers, RM Brown, did it recently for his Patreon subscriber-only thing (albeit I think he’s using the older American version, not this later one for Penguin), and I’ve owned it for nearly ten years so it’s high time that I did, probably.

Back at uni when I was doing film studies we had to get acquainted with Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and hitherto that’s all the Benjamin I’ve read. 30 years later, I am at least now acquainted with more of his stuff—I suppose this is best described as a “greatest hits” collection—and, frankly, uncertain what to make of it. The introduction by Amit Chaudhuri was unhelpful, and I’ll confess to coming close to not finishing the thing after I’d ploughed through the title work. I’m glad I did persist, cos I did find things of value, but it was difficult and I’m not sure how worthwhile the effort actually was… is it the sort of thing that just travels at a certain height above my head or is there actually less to it than meets the eye? I don’t know. I’m sure I would’ve got a lot more out of the essays on Proust and Kafka if I were actually familiar with them both. But a lot of the rest is kind of slow-going dense abstraction, particularly in “One-Way Street” itself, a collection of aphoristic observations that I found largely impenetrable. I don’t really feel like my time was wasted as such, but equally I’m not sure how much I got out of it.