The Details: On Love, Death and Reading

by Tegan Bennett Daylight

A book about the connections we form with literature and each other

Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books - as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader. In this deeply insightful and intimate work, Daylight describes how her reading has nourished her life, and how life has informed her reading. In both, she shows us that it's the small points of connection - the details - that really matter: what we notice when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we make friends. In life's disasters and delights, the details are what we can share and compare and carry with us.

Daylight writes with invigorating candour and compassion about her mother's last days; her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath (in her celebrated essay ‘Vagina'); her long admiration of Helen Garner and George Saunders; and her great loves and friendships. Each chapter is a revelation, and a celebration of how books offer not an escape from ‘real life' but a richer engagement with the business of living.

The result is a work that will truly deepen your relationship with books, and with other readers. The delight is in the details.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Books About Books, Memoir, Short Stories

188 pages, Paperback

Published July 8, 2020

About the author

Tegan Bennett Daylight is a fiction writer, teacher and critic. She is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, Six Bedrooms, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the Steele Rudd Award. She lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and two children.

Reviews

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5★s

The Details is my first book by Aussie author Tegan Bennett Daylight and I’m finding it hard to formulate a review. I found her writing to be filled with eloquence, passion and sincerity as she brought her stories to life. The details about the harsh reality of the death of Daylight’s mother brought me to tears, of the death of her good friend Georgia Blain, also an author. She also wrote about her experiences of childbirth – again filled with detail. Daylight’s love of the works of authors Helen Garner and George Saunders; her teaching of literature and her own life as a writer – again, the details are what make up the living we all do.

Although the chapters seemed disjointed with no flow on throughout the book – more like diary entries formed into chapters - I did enjoy the book and did find the author’s words vivid and effective. Recommended.

With thanks to Simon & Schuster AU for my ARC to read in exchange for an honest review.

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It turns out Tegan Bennett Daylight and I have a lot in common: we both adore George Saunders while being slightly suspect about how damn nice he seems (though we read some of his stories differently), we both relish Jerry Seinfeld’s joy in examining the craft of comedy in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, we’re both lifelong readers who delight in the details and we both have a deep and enduring appreciation for the work of Helen Garner. Perhaps out of necessity Daylight is less concerned than I am about how little her tertiary students have read while I found those insights troubling – after all this book shows us the meaning and comfort books can bring to our inner lives. I thought the book wasn’t completely cohesive and a couple of essays didn’t comfortably fit but there is so much here for book lovers. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the essays on Garner, Saunders, Perelman and to a lesser extent Blain if I wasn’t already familiar with their work but damn it was satisfying to read them through Daylight’s clear-eyed lens. She loves these writers and she loves reading and that is palpable on the page. What a gift that is to readers!

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some lovely essays on books and reading, especially the critical reviews of Garner and Saunders (both of whom Daylight clearly adores). The whole thing didn't always hang together that well and a few of the essays seemed a bit more alarmist about 'young people these days' then I feel is justified, but on the whole, a really enjoyable read.

[Krystelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Please note this is a 3.5.

This book is an ode to reading, a swan song of books loved over the course of a life so far. It sweeps through the valleys and hills of the author’s life, and it shows the immense impact that books have on someone throughout their growth. I loved a lot of the material in here- there’s some incredible stuff, and the book makes for some amazing insights. There is nothing quite like the love of a book someone has personally.

With that said, I think some of the essays meander a bit, and some go a little amiss. They perhaps don’t belong as well as they could have, especially when others glimmer like they do. The insights into the author’s teaching, while sobering (and concerning- to write without reading is like breathing without air!) were perhaps made for another book. This book was a lovely read, and I hope sincerely to eventually have similar loves and insights as I grow into my collection over the coming years.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was stunning. The author has such a way with words that instantly fills the pages with colour, as if you’re experiencing everything right there with her.

[Lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite read of the year so far. Wow. My love of short stories combined with her poignant reality checks and appreciation of sensory detail had me entranced. She so brilliantly reminds us that no narrative will ‘restore order to the utter chaos of life,’ yet literature is what engages and supports us through the chaos. Thanks Tegan.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tegan Bennett Daylight is a guest of the 2020 (digital) Melbourne Writers Festival in a session with Charlotte Wood called 'In Which Two Friends Discuss Reading' and so I bought her latest book, The Details, on Love, Death and Reading.  And although this collection of essays includes other topics, you won't be surprised to learn that the ones about reading interested me most.

The tone of these two essays, 'The Difficulty is the Point' and 'Inventing the Teenager' couldn't be more different to Debra Adelaide's uplifting book about reading, The Innocent Reader . Bennett's writing in these essays is characterised by melancholy and a sense of loss.  But the loss she conveys in the essays about reading is not like the loss she evokes when writing about the deaths of her mother and her friend the author Georgia Blain.  The loss of a reading culture in contemporary life is deeply felt, and personal too, but there is also a palpable sense of frustration about the diminishing importance of reading in our society.  Because unlike the inevitability of death, the loss of reading is a choice. Being made, perhaps, by people who do not know what they are losing, and who are not aware of how that choice impacts on others.  Because a shared reading culture is something that has connected us ever since the emergence of universal literacy.

This is not something I need to explain to readers of this blog.  All of us who read and write LitBlogs love — and need — that sense of connection.  We are all well-read, and we need to talk about the books we've read.  We love it when a blogger reviews a book we've also read, often even more so when it's a book we read from long ago.   Whether it's Bill reviewing Cranford at The Australian Legend or Karen reviewing Staying On at Booker Talk or Simon at Tredynas Days reviewing Old Filth or Sue at Whispering Gums reviewing Persuasion, what we love is the experience of 'being' with someone who has read the same book.  Or, if we haven't read it, wanting to, and sharing connections about other books brought to mind by the blogger's review.  That book talk brings back memories, ideas, opinions and emotions that are part of who we are as individuals.  All of us will understand the intense frustration and dismay that Tegan Bennett Daylight expresses when she writes about teaching EngLit to wannabe primary school teachers...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/08/06/t...

[John Purcell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this highly readable collection of essays on books, reading, writing and loss. The author, Tegan Bennett Daylight, reveals herself as both teacher and student, happily flicking between wisdom and ignorance, being both master and apprentice. We read about the influence of Helen Garner on her early work, examine what George Saunders does that few else can, touch on Moby Dick, Proust, The Triffids, the death of friends, of parents and we feel sad for Holden Caufield. Just my kind of wet weather reading. Highly recommended.

(When I picked up this lively, conversational book to read I had no idea it was written in Katoomba, the town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where I am currently staying, and that Katoomba features in a few of the essays. I am sure this influenced how I read the book. Like it was a series of catch-ups for coffee with a very literate neighbour.)

[Chris Waterford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this series of essays for their honesty and passion (especially about reading).I also loved that she loved two of my favourite writers, Helen Garner and Georgia Blain and wrote an essay on each. The more she wrote about a third writer, George Saunders, the more I was certain that I would continue to avoid his writing. I also loved her essays "Vagina", "Detail II" and "Detail III". Recommended.
8/10

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting range of personal, literary essays.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The details are where it's at in this beautiful book of clear, warm, precise writing. I took a break after each essay to turn it over in my mind. It has left me feeling inspired to read, write and notice, and somehow I now have even more books on my to-read list.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Tegan Bennett Daylight added the subtitle 'Reading, Love and Death' to her memoir/essay collection, The Details , just so that I'd buy it. Obviously I did. Immediately. What's better than reading about reading, love and death? Nothing!

And this book delivered.

Daylight's collection of essays examines her own reading; her love for particular authors (Helen Garner and Georgia Blain get their own chapters); the birth of her children; the death of her mother; and the reading done by those around her. Each essay stands alone, but literature binds them all.

I gulped this book down in two sittings - it's what happens when you find a kindred spirit on the page. Daylight's descriptions of her earliest reading experiences (especially discovering The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy) were so closely aligned to my own that it seemed strange.

We three children read Frances Hodgson Burnett, Swallows and Amazons, the Narnia books, all of Tintin and much of the Famous Five. All those deserted, orphaned or fortuitously parentless children of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction feeding themselves, building shelters, in a way their readers never had to do. And all that detail - all that food and weather, water and light.

But of course, it's not strange. We find what we need in stories. As Daylight says of these books -

I learned to overlook the archaic, to be open to the oddness of the different eras, and to read for something else. That something else was what I describe...as 'sensory detail'; the minutiae of life that is the real stuff that makes up a book.

I was charmed by the opening essays on reading, and awed by the frankness of Vagina, where Daylight describes her long recovery from childbirth, but it was not until halfway through the collection, when I began an essay with the unassuming title, Detail II, that I was stopped in my reading tracks.

It's the story of her mother's death. By this stage, the reader has conjured a picture of Daylight's mother - she's an avid reader and a book presser (that's my description for someone who presses books on you); she's a 'serious noticer'; and is curious and 'utterly fearless'. She is also dying, and chooses to do so at home, surrounded by family. Nursing someone who is palliative is exhausting. Daylight's descriptions are the truest I've come across -

It is a condition of caring for the dying that you simultaneously cannot bear to have them die and cannot bear for them to live one day longer.

And of her living grief -

I had wished for a long time that she would die. Not just because I loved her and didn't wish her to suffer - which I did, and which I didn't - but because I didn't want to suffer.

Daylight further explores '...the inadequate way we are in the face of death' in a chapter about Georgia Blain. It is crushingly sad, and I reflected on the incomprehensible pain of losing a friend. In both essays, I was struck by how swiftly and accurately Daylight gets to the core of loss.

The collection closes with Daylight's thoughts on the future of tertiary education, and how teenagers engage with reading (or not). She notes that now, the student who reads widely is an anomaly - I don't despair anymore. I just notice it - and goes on to frame this lack of reading within an historical context -

...when the book became readily available in English households in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people feared a kind of apocolypse of communication. Instead of sitting by the fire in the evening and talking, everyone would disappear into the silence of text, and civilisation would come to an end.

It casts flash fiction; 140 character missives; and a witty hashtag in a new light.

You may not be familiar with every book or author that Daylight refers to in The Details, but I don't think that detracts from this wonderful homage to reading.

4/5 Enriching.

[Ms C Pride · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this in bed, read until 2am and I have now finished it at 9am after waking this morning. I love TBD's sentences and her control and the shock of beauty that will occasionally arrest me.

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Details (Scribner 2020) is a slim collection of essays on writing that really packs a punch. Written by Tegan Bennett Daylight and subtitled On Love, Death and Reading, this non-fiction writers’ companion is a thoughtful meditation very much in the vein of one of the author’s literary heroes, Helen Garner. It features the same sparse prose, the sharply-observed details of the minutiae of life, the same intimate interrogation of literature and connections.
With peers and friends such as Charlotte Wood and the late Georgia Blain, Tegan Bennett Daylight belongs to a group of authors who write with compassion, curiosity about the human condition, admiration for other writers, and an endless exploration of what writing means and the relevance of writing and reading in relation to the details of our days.
The essays are sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, sometimes distressing. But they are always intelligent, searching and thoughtful. There is memoir writing about her early life and her introduction to books and reading. There are love songs to her favourite authors; a traumatic account of her birth experiences; a discourse on the role of teaching creative writing. She dissects whole stories, or paragraphs, or parses the meaning from individual sentences, trying to understand why that piece of writing works – why it is so funny or so complex or so moving. She talks about friends and family, and about death and dying and losing those we love. She interrogates international authors and Australian writers. With a few well-chosen black and white photographs included, this book would be the perfect gift for a writer friend or an emerging writer, or for someone who loves to read. If you enjoyed the literary conversations found in Charlotte Wood’s The Writer’s Room, or if you are drawn to authors such as Helen Garner, George Saunders, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro, this is the book for you. Tegan Bennett Daylight interrogates the craft of writing, its role and its many forms, its structure and meaning. ‘The difficulty is the point’, she concludes, which is heartening, in a strange way. She challenges the reader / writer to experiment, to study the classics, to learn from those advancing in unusual forms, and to always – always – remember the emotions behind the words.

[Heather Boundy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of essays/short stories by Daylight (what a beautiful name too) It was one of those books you read slowly in order to savour every word. I don't want to say too much about it as it might take the enjoyment away for readers - but I found it special.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book of essays. Everything you need to know is in the title and it was a joy to read. I read it as a library book but will be buying my own copy immediately as I know I will return to it again and again, so many things to underline and savour.

[Helen - Great Reads & Tea Leaves · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘A great book changes with you.’

I am so undecided on this book. Initially I was attracted by two things. Firstly the cover: that seemingly 1970s style vibe from the subject herself (could easily have been me) to the sepia tinge common of that era. Secondly, the synopsis speaks to all bibliophiles. Yet by the conclusion I was just not sold on it in many ways. Don’t get me wrong, Tegan has many worthwhile offerings here for contemplation but I found there was no flow to the book and I was not onboard with all she had to say. Yet, that can be a good thing right ... to push your boundaries? Thus my overall indecision on the complexity that is this book.

‘Literature isn’t, for me, a classroom, it is right at the centre of my life. I don’t ‘learn’ from it. It isn’t ‘good for me’. It isn’t work or study or a hobby. It is me. I think in lines from books I’ve read. It’s alive in me all the time, I’m helpless, it runs through me like a torrent.’

Tegan is a wonderful writer. Her prose is eloquent yet rugged with her insights into reading and writing evident for all. From her own life and career, to her reflections on other authors, she offers clear and insightful ideas. She expresses her great loves and great concerns when it comes to reading and writing. With a great variance in chapter topics there is something for everyone from family to famous authors. Her understanding on the technique of writing and her advice to her tertiary students demonstrates her great love of literature. She delves into great depth on particular authors such as Saunders.

‘If you are a reader like I am you will have become closely acquainted with more than one body of work. There’s something particular in the reading of one author’s entire oeuvre. Easy with Austen; less so with Dickens. I have read every book written by Jane Austen, Tim Winton, Helen Garner, David Malouf, Charlotte Wood, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, James Wood, Alan Hollinghurst and George Saunders. In this way you enter into a lifelong conversation with the author. You watch their material change, their attitudes to it shifting. You learn how to read them.’

What I struggled with was the seemingly random selection of chapters and topics. It’s not that I expected a sequential tale but I found it to be disjointed overall in its approach. The common theme of reading was not strong enough to gel it all together in my opinion. Also being a teacher myself, I could relate to some of the aspects Tegan shone a light. However, I disagreed with other things, for example, her summation of young adult literature.

‘When I stood in front of a class I felt an excited kinship, and a sense of my enormous luck–to be there, right now, amongst young people, as their reading and writing took shape. I still feel lucky, because it’s a privilege to be next to young people at any stage of their lives. But sometimes, when I read their writing, I want to set up a howl of desolation. Their flimsy words scud across an empty landscape, a landscape unpopulated by all the books that came before. There’s no weight, there’s no texture, there’s no echo, there’s no depth.’

All up this is an interesting read for lovers of literature. Here you will find one reader/writer’s thoughts on the impact of a life of reading and how it holds your hand as you journey through life together.

‘I want them to notice what a powerful tool literature is, to understand that it helps us to know ourselves and the society we live in. I want them to discover that if they learn to handle language they might not feel as though they’re worth nothing, have nothing to say.’



This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.

[Jessica Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely little book of essays which, true to the collection's title, are interested in the concept of noticing the details of literature--the very textures and subtleties that anchor literature in sensory reality. The stuff we remember about a book, that strikes us. I loved many of her own illustrations--the stories of the births of her children particularly, and moments teaching; thoughts about what reading means for oneself. I'm not sure I agree with the criticism of others here: I felt this was cohesive as a collection, her theme is apparent throughout. I only felt that in her frustrations at how much the activity of reading has diminished amongst her students, that her disdain for its quality, popular literature was very apparent. I think I used to feel that too. But I've lightened up over the years. I still think reading the classics, the foundations of literature is important but I also think genre fiction can say and do as much, can throw up the granular, can soothe and direct. I just think there were times when she did seem quite liberal elitist. Ha.

But I also do agree about the state of reading. A fellow student noticed, when doing an honours year in literature, at a good university in Melbourne that those creative writing kids (obviously so different from us literature ones, haha) did not read. Like much at all. That is what Daylight is particularly highlighting here. This is not so much about the average student in other fields as actual writing students... who do not read and yet somehow get into these top writing courses. How can you write without reading? I understand her frustrations: we need a field of reference, of influence. How can one write without an awareness of what has been said before?

I did not agree with her about Brian Dillon's Essayism, even though I enjoyed that book at the time. But she has encouraged me to read more Helen Garner, to try George Saunders and S.J. Perelman even though I'm not so sure I enjoyed those meditations, gushings even, as I did the details of her own experience--early moments with her babies, leading up to the loss of her mother. The details do indeed matter, and they ought to ring true. The universal in the personal.

[Robyn Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daylight on writing. Good stuff. Very readable. This is a bit of a wander through her life, and why writing and reading are important to her, and thereby it follows, to all of us.

The book focuses on process, via the detail. e.g. Chapter 3 is a critique of Helen Garner’s writing and fictional book Monkey Grip. Daylight confesses to having been markedly influenced by Garner’s writing. And she asks, amongst other questions - when does a diary become a publishable novel? Can it? This is pertinent given the release of Garner’s diaries in other publications. And is this book of Daylight’s a bit of a diary? Or a memoir? Or a series of essays about Daylights day to day encounters with the details, hard work and joys of reading and writing?

I like what she says about teaching young adult students:

‘This is what I want for my students. First I want them to read a book all the way through. I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a powerful tool literature is, to understand that it helps us to know ourselves and the society we live in. I want them to discover if they learn to handle language they might not feel as though they’re worth nothing, have nothing to say. Finally, I want them to see that reading breeds thinking, and thinking breeds resistance …’

I liked the content and purpose of some chapters more than others in Tegan’s book. But the writing is always smooth and fluent.

[Mabearbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

It can certainly be seen that Tegan Bennett Daylight has lived a life surrounded and immersed in books and writing by the details she includes through her observations and the amazing compassion with which she writes. I really enjoyed her much celebrated essay "Vagina," her candid writing on the experience of childbirth is sure to resonate with many individuals who have shared this or a similar experience. The compassionate, sad but yet uplifting way that Daylight writes about her mother's last days is just simply beautiful. This author encourages her readers to recognise and understand how important literature is in understanding ourselves as well as the society we've in and what a powerful tool it is. We are also encouraged to see that reading fosters thinking and thinking breeds resistance and in these current times , this is something that I think is highly beneficial and important. This engaging and thought provoking book will keep you thinking and reflecting on how and what you read as well as on your engagement with literature in general after you turn the last page.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tegan Bennett Daylight has a talent, curated over a lifetime steeped in literature, of seeing the world, people, situations, prose, and words in a striking, memorable way.

'Vagina' is probably the most well-known essay in the collection - and a must for women and men alike to read, regardless of whether or not you've had children. A very thought-provoking exploration about how little we know about women's health and draws attention to how silent (intentionally or not) that literature has been so far in depicting strange, daunting, and messy realities of womanhood. This essay will change lives.

Not only that, though. 'Just anguish' and 'The difficulty is the point' also left an impression on me as a life-long reader and someone who is learning day-by-day to read like a writer and let that reading infuse my prose with resonances of books gone before me.

I feel like I've lived in Bennett Daylight's head for the last few days, and my life, my reading, and my writing will be all the better for it.

[Jenny Esots · Rating 4 out of 5]

A homage to reading. There is much collaboration between authors who hone their craft i.e. Charlotte Wood, Georgia Blain, Gabrielle Carey along with Tegan Bennett Daylight, who are all friends.
In the process of reading this I sought out the author Georgia Blain's final work - The Museum of Words. Words are what draws writers together and Tegan spends time outlining or rather lamenting the students of today who don't read anything and if they do it is not an Australian author. This is a depressing scenario - and Australians are said to be good buyers of books - just not of their own authors.
We all know the devil is in the details, but here we hear it is in the sensory details. A writer brings a story to life with these details of how something smelt, felt and tasted etc. - I immediately think of Christos Tsiolkas who really knows how to create a sense of time, place and meaning.
Tegan may be a writers writer - but I dearly hope she writes some more for us all.

[Dani Netherclift · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a few disappointing lockdown reads, The Details was a balm and delight, and the only book that has successfully kept me for the duration of three lovely nights away from the easy lure of endless streamed TV. Even when it dealt with loss and melancholy, every word drew me in, and I savoured each sentence. It helps to have a familiarity and love of the writers and texts that Daylight refers to, but it's the love of what she has read, and how it been embedded in every aspect of her life that truly resonates. The essays speak not just to a love of reading generally, but to texts as a parallel narrative to one's lived experience, and the richness of that.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of essays, stories, thoughts on a theme. It’s the most interesting book on reading and writing, every different section had so much to offer: about books, writers, personal experiences, teaching, society today and in the past. It’s one of those books that open doors for you, to other writers, new books. When I read Helen Garner, anything she writes, I find myself thinking, I wish she was my friend. Tegan Bennet Daylight is another author having the same effect. She shares so much I can understand, her writing has clarity, honesty, brevity, just enough detail to make it all seem so close to being a real person in my house.

[Amy Heap · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book of essays about a life, love, grief, friendship, and reading. Tegan Bennett Daylight writes so movingly about the power of reading, and how it has impacted her life. It helps that I have read many of the books she writes about, and that she quotes The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my favourite of the Chronicles of Narnia, but the book is also about the connection between people, so I don’t think a lot of prior reading is necessary in order to enjoy it.

[Heather Taylor-Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Details is delightful read mostly about reading, so bibliophiles will zip through it, as I did. This is not to say that Tegan Bennett Daylight doesn’t hit hard with her opinion – her vagina essay is proof of that – but there’s a whimsicality to this book that gives it its momentum. Academic, daughter, mother, writer, reader – she’s all there, all the time, and though our lifestyles are uniquely different, the book makes me feel seen.

[Sally Piper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This elegantly written and candid collection of essays is a glorious celebration of the author's reading life, both personally and intellectually, as well as a tribute to friendships and the people she's loved and lost. It was an absolute joy to read for its intelligence and close attention to, well...the details of her connections with others and books.

[Bronwyn Mcloughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting collection of essays : autobiographical, philosophical, literary critiques ..... fascinating insights into literature and the way it informs our lives, whether by its absence or its manifestations. Thought provoking reflections on the digital generations and their exposure, or lack of, to stories and the impact this has on learning and embracing the world.

[Mcmum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It helped me to break a prolonged reading drought by reminding me of the soothing balm that falling into a good book provides. There were a number of times when a short turn of phrase took my breath away .... they were so good that I was thrown into momentary explosions of exhilaration. It also took me back to my own childhood and the recent death of my mother.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read because it was part of my aus voices class but honestly loved it. First nonfiction I think I've read and first collection of essays. Made me rethink the way I read and write and overall consume books to learn. Definitely gave me a lot of reading recs. Some essays weren't my favourite but overall I enjoyed the collection.