Feel Free: Essays

This was an odd selection for my book club and I wonder what we're going to talk about. Individual essays may spark conversation, but there are a lot of them, so we won't be able to do the book justice. I am now officially a Zadie Smith fan, having read two of her essay collections but only one of her novels. Must read more of them. This book feels like at least two different books in one, and it is helpfully divided into sections, so the reader will see lumped together essays about art, or books, or more personal essays in the final section. In any case, Smith's skill is on display.

I found some of these essays to be fascinating and thought provoking (the one on Facebook, the one about living in Italy, the one about public libraries) and some to be more tedious (the ones about art, the dance ones). These were hit or miss for me but I do like Smith's particular style of writing.

I'm marking this as “did not finish”, even though technically I didn't even properly start it. Zadie Smith's latest essay collection, Feel Free, was this week's ‘Book of the Week' on BBC Radio 4. The five episodes each cover one (probably abridged?) essay from the collection, read by Zadie Smith herself:

Episode 1 = ‘The Bathroom' (a very personal essay on Smith's upbringing in the 1980s)
Episode 2 = ‘Dance Lessons For Writers' (on the connection between dancing and writing)
Episode 3 = ‘On Optimism and Despair', talk given on November 10 2016 after receiving a literary prize (about the multiculturalism featured in her novels and whether it has “failed”)
Episode 4 = ‘The Inaugural Philip Roth Lecture', given on 27 October 2016 (on the art and practice of writing fiction)
Episode 5 = ‘Alte Frau By Balthasar Denner' (thoughts on the painting by the German artist)

I really enjoyed listening to these essays this week. Episodes 1 and 3 were particularly strong. However, looking at how large the whole collection is, I doubt I will be reading it in its entirety, at least not for some time, which is why I'm marking this as “DNF”. I'm not too interested in the subjects on many of the remaining essays and imagine the essays chosen for this series are among the collection's highlights.