Either/Or

⚖The case for it

Part one holds the best account of boredom anyone has written, and by boredom I mean the whole life a person builds to avoid meeting it: crop rotation, affairs, the appetite for beginnings. Nobody has matched it since. The letters that follow are a slog, granted. But something sly happens along the way. By the end you are quietly on the side of the man you would not want near your sister, and that preference is still sitting there after the last page, asking what exactly you do with your own evenings.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Eight hundred pages, and the deck is stacked: the aesthete gets the wit, the opera essay, and the Seducer's Diary, while Judge Wilhelm answers with two letters of bottomless ethical throat-clearing. Kierkegaard hides behind pseudonyms inside pseudonyms, and the committed life he means to defend is the worst-written thing in the book. Cordelia exists to be an experiment.

— the honest librarian