Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm reading a book I picked up in a tiny independent bookstore, "The Unreality of Memory" by Elisa Gabbert. She is an essayist, who can be found in The New York Times magazine, The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. The essays are engaging, probably because she clearly has done mountains of research, but focuses through her own life and experiences, so you know she is biased and not entirely objective, and she makes this transparent, and therefore easier to trust her. One essay is about insomnia, another about iconic events likes 9/11, the sinking of the Titanic and the Challenger tragedy. She discusses media in the age of Trump and witches in Salem. Her curiousity gives us an opportunity to go back and look at events in our culture and see them with fresh eyes. I'm not intimidated by her encyclopediac knowledge, rather she seems like someone I'd walk with to get a cappuchino. I found this book by being able to brouse, masked, in a local bookstore. I've missed the discovery of books I never knew existed, and didn't know I'd enjoy. Yes, I ordered a ton of books during the pandemic. But I was limited by what my interests already were or book reviews, or recommendations. Now the bookstore can speak to me and the owners and buyers urge me to discover new ideas, writers, and worlds. So satisfying.