My favorite current read — likely the best book I’ve read for a couple of years — is Sarah Bakewell’s “At The Existentialist Cafe“. However, for me, the thing has quite tiny print, even as a hardback, that rather quickly exhausts my aging eyesight. So I have considered buying a Kindle version (resizable text), but upon visiting Bakewell’s website, I found that the BBC has published audio readings of the thing. Alas, the BBC readings seem to be time-limited, and have now expired (however, I made a mental note and a bookmark to pay attention to the BBC Book of the Week site for future reference for other readings of other books). And then there is the Audible site where you can find and hear a three or four minute sample. Finally, I came upon John Hockenberry’s interview with Bakewell in April of this year. Check ’em all out.
After I mentioned our library visit last week, Herman tells me that he recently read this book as well. But he didn’t make any further comment, except to say that he had once visited Sartre and de Beauvoir’s graves in the Montparnasse cemetery near his apartment at the time … And it was probably about the time when I first met Herman in 1960s college that I read, like many other students of that era, Sartre’s “Nausea”. Just reminiscing … never mind.