The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

272 pages

Langue : English

Publié 2021 par Simon & Schuster.

ISBN :: 978-1-5011-5364-8
Goodreads:: 56897474

A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express, until now―from the creator of the popular online project of the same name.

Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.”

If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig …

A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express, until now―from the creator of the popular online project of the same name.

Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.”

If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig began his epic quest to fill the gaps in the language of emotion. Born as a website in 2009, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has garnered widespread critical acclaim, inspired TED talks, album titles, cocktails, and even tattoos. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,” says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars.

By turns poignant, funny, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition―from “astrophe,” the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to “zenosyne,” the sense that time keeps getting faster.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering the ineffable feelings that make up our lives, which have far more in common than we think. With a gorgeous package and beautifully illustrated throughout, this is the perfect gift for creatives, word nerds, and people everywhere.

1 édition

Jens Finkhäuser a publié une critique de The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows par John Koenig

Great addition to The Devil's Dictionary or The Meaning of Liff

5 étoiles

I draw the comparison to the above two books because it's a similar approach: you make a kind of dictionary of interesting stuff, or through a lens that makes the stuff interesting. In the case of this book, it's about "obscure sorrows", but -- as the foreword notes -- it's not actually about sad things.

Rather it is about naming those moments in life where the absurdity of common moments hits you, and opens you up, if just for a moment, to the melancholy of contemplating the point of it all. It can be joyful, it can be sad, but it's definitely an experience.

I find it's perfect for the bathroom shelf (all book lovers have a bathroom shelf, right?). You can read a page, consider a word or five, how it applies to your life. And then the moment passes.

I can't claim to have read …

I draw the comparison to the above two books because it's a similar approach: you make a kind of dictionary of interesting stuff, or through a lens that makes the stuff interesting. In the case of this book, it's about "obscure sorrows", but -- as the foreword notes -- it's not actually about sad things.

Rather it is about naming those moments in life where the absurdity of common moments hits you, and opens you up, if just for a moment, to the melancholy of contemplating the point of it all. It can be joyful, it can be sad, but it's definitely an experience.

I find it's perfect for the bathroom shelf (all book lovers have a bathroom shelf, right?). You can read a page, consider a word or five, how it applies to your life. And then the moment passes.

I can't claim to have read the thing in its entirety. But what it makes it a five start recommendation to me is that, so far, I haven't found a single word here yet that I could not relate to.

In addition to that, these words are rarely just neologisms. Rather, they're well researched neologisms, drawing from older roots of words, or from words common in widely disparate fields that unexpectedly collide here. For anyone like myself who enjoys tidbits of etymology, there's the additional joy of discovering how each word is constructed.

Totally worth buying and keeping. Not a light read, though.