Review of This Is Water by David Foster Wallace

Title: This is Water
Author: David Foster Wallace
Source: Borrowed from the library
Series:  Standalone
Rating: 4.5/5
















Goodreads Summary:
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journaland the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

This is a super short book with a lot of pages only having a few lines of text but this book impacted me in a big way. The book is a talk that David Foster Wallace did at Kenyon College and it really made me think about the people around me, especially the part he talked about going to the grocery store. I know that when I am standing in line I am not thinking about the people around me or how their day was, but he tells us to think about them and maybe their day was absolutely horrible and to think about how we would feel being that person.  I work for a company that we have to really empathize with the people I am dealing with so when I leave work I am not always in the greatest mood depending on how my day went.

I enjoyed how this book made me re-evaluate how I should perceive the world around me. This was an excellent novel and I highly recommend it.