Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
Outside of a Dog is the captivating account of twenty-five
books drawn from the fields of literature, psychology and
philosophy, and a memoir of a reading self.
Tracing the formative role books have played in his life, Rick
Gekoski trains the same ironic and analytic eye on these books and
their authors as he does on himself. The result is unique: a
sustained, witty book dedicated to the proposition that we are what
we read. Outside of A Dog might be described as an
intellectual bibliomemoir, except that the author regards the noun
'intellectual' as a term of abuse.
Gekoski's twenty-five include: Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the
Egg; Magnus Hirschfeld Sexual Anomalies and Perversions;
Allen Ginsberg, Howl; J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the
Rye; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Descartes,
Meditations; David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding; W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems; F. R.
Leavis, The Common Pursuit; Matthew Arnold, Culture and
Anarchy; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test;
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; R. D.
Laing, The Divided Self; Germaine Greer, The Female
Eunuch; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; A. S. Neill,
Summerhill; Roald Dahl, Matilda; Alice Miller,
Pictures of a Childhood; A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth,
and Logic; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams;
Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy; Peter Wright, Spycatcher;
and Rick Gekoski, Staying Up.
