Reading this was sort of like eating a bag of skittles. If I ate the bag all at once it might be tasty and delicious, but all the flavours would become muddled together, indistinct. As it was, I found I had to eat a few at a time, in order to perceive the different themes. This is a collection of pithy aphorisms and mostly brief abstractions about the world and the place the author occupies in it, as (I gathered) a writer, teacher, mother, sick person, among others. The quotation on the back flap says it all: "think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages." I defy any reader not to feel envious of some of these deep pockets of wisdom (and to speculate on the long book of which they may be the most quotable bits), tossed off almost as afterthoughts. I defy you also to pick up the disparate, wispy threads of narrative that bind these thoughts together. Every so often I thought I had it... but maybe not. ( )

A small collection of aphorisms. It's surprising that you do get a good sense of the author despite the format and length. ( )

Bad art is from no one to no one

The first beautiful songs you hear tend to stay beautiful because better than beauty, which is everywhere, is the memory of first discovering beauty.

Lack of effort poorly conceals lack of ability

The trouble with setting goals is that you're constantly working toward what you used to want.
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I always find reading Sarah Manguso’s books fascinating. Her sparse words on the page are like what’s at the very heart of her words, her thoughts reduced down to the essence of her subject. Owing to my practice of using Post-its to mark the lines that impressed me the most, before copying them down in a notebook, I’m left with the best of the best of the best. As she says of the book, “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.” I find her writing quite moving and always intelligent.
As with most unique writing styles, many book reviewers described this very special style using the usual reviewing terms, reducing the different to the normal. These reviews reduced this book to a random collection of aphorisms, or poetry, or an odd style of essay, but all those classifications miss the bigger picture. This book has an order (shall we say a “plot”) from the arrangement, interplay, and progression of her thoughts? The reader isn’t left to bounce from interesting thought to intriguing line, there’s more at work here. Because I felt something more was going on between the covers, I found myself reading and rereading 300 Arguments on the same day.
Manguso is a middle-aged woman who’s reflecting on where she’s been in her life, and where she thinks she may be headed. Within the book, she’s remembering her family, pondering her life as a mother, describing her sexual actions and longings, and thinking where her writing is going. Basically, she’s doing some midlife scorekeeping, wondering just how she’s doing.
After eight books of essays and poetry, her first novel Very Cold People comes out in 2022. She has won many different book awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and 300 Arguments was named a best book of the year by twenty different publications. She has taught writing at Princeton, Columbia, Pratt Institute, and is currently teaching at Antioch University.
I personally “discovered” her in this summer’s issue of the Paris Review, and have been trying to make up for lost time ever since. I’ve read five of her books, with another on its way to me. Each book is very distinctive, clever, emotional, well done, and interesting—what more could you want from a writer? Once again, it’s obviously never too late to find something new. ( )

A delightful read. A slow picture builds as you read these initially unconnected passages that's greater than the sum of its parts. ( )