Breaking Bread with the Dead

Alan Jacobs has given us a toolbox stocked with concepts that balance the pop of a self-help book with the depth of a college seminar. Breaking Bread With the Dead is an invitation, but even more than that, an emancipation: from the buzzing prison of the here and now, into the wide-open field of the past. -- Robin Sloan * author of Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore * This elegant book moved me, especially when it led me to rethink time with my mentors and how they taught me, to paraphrase Wordsworth, what to love and how to love. On so many pages, I found things I know I will carry forward. -- Sherry Turkle * author of Alone Together * A beautiful case for reading old books as a way to cultivate personal depth in shallow times. Breaking Bread with the Dead is timely and timeless - the perfect ending to the trilogy Alan Jacobs began with The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and continued with How To Think. I've stolen so much from these books. So will you. -- Austin Kleon * bestselling author of Steal Like An Artist * Alan Jacobs captures the nervous joy of helping students discover that writers of the long ago and far away can mitigate the feeling of unmoored loneliness that afflicts so many young people today. Never scolding or didactic, Breaking Bread with the Dead is a compassionate book about the saving power of reading, and a moving account of how writers of the past can help us cope in the frantic present. -- Andrew Delbanco * author of The War Before the War *