You just proved me right

Is every article a vitriolic argument now? Are we blaming people for not spending their money correctly?

I mean every book has major themes you can use to rationalize the smaller events. In Of Mice and Men, why did they come to Curley's farm? Because Lenny is on the run. What theme does this inherit? That dreams are repeatedly deferred by our sometimes literal heavy-handedness. And it's a fragile, costly balance between toeing the line like George and harboring these dreams at all, like Lenny does. You can read a book at face value but if you want to teach a book you need to keep track of themes and larger conversations.

I'm always puzzled by posts claiming they are unable to read or understand books. You have the knowledge within you to understand anything. Nonfiction especially has to be completely transparent and faithful to the subject. A great recent nonfiction book is The White Devil's Daughters, which covers human trafficking in San Francisco. It's clear, carefully written, features a coherent history and the chapters are punctual. It is telling you the purpose of the book with every word. You could also try a Naomi Klein book - she is very clear, persuasive and in love with everything she writes. And every nonfiction book is describing some shocking or unaccountable discrepancy between what we believe and the truth of the matter. Every book does that, really, but most pointedly nonfiction. I would just get lost in the facts of the book itself. The actual "purpose" and "importance" is something the reader has to decide.

And I don't think there would be much use in taking notes. Most information in a book just serves to frame the narrative overall. Most of the facts in a nonfiction book do not need to be committed to memory. A book should be able to convey a general theme or thesis that you CAN remember and remark on throughout the text.

What a pointless and irrelevant study. "Successful" people now often battle drug addiction, familial fracturing and fragile social lives. It's a completely different and more focused conversation than this isolated theory of Freud's. Also, as others have pointed out, Freud did loads of coke despite living a tenuously middle class life on the verge of poverty. "Health" cannot be measured on a scale.