Meditations

⚖The case for it

Book One is the strange opening: Marcus goes through everyone who made him, grandfather, mother, tutors, his adoptive father, crediting each with the particular things they taught him, before any philosophy starts. What follows lands two thousand years later with almost no translating required, which is why readers call it “a manual for being a complete, mature adult.” The register is private and gruff, a man talking to himself, with “a spartan charm.” Hammond and Waterfield get named for annotation that makes the Stoic vocabulary click. Read an entry a day, or “knock it out in one wet weekend.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

He circles the same handful of ideas until the back half adds nothing: life is short, death is natural, stop being surprised that people act like people. The twelve books have no order, a “dot point nature begging an overarching structure that just wasn’t there,” which one reader reduces to “a bog-standard blog.” The equation of natural with good goes unargued. And there is the author himself: a man with total control of his circumstances advising acceptance of yours, in an empire run on slaves. Critics say the modern adoption “brings out the worst in his readers.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings