Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Review 490: Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year

Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning? Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning? by Ian Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



While I’m not there yet, this age will be in my future (baring something catastrophic), so why not read about one man’s experience with living the age of sixty. This diary is more contemplative than what happened each day, although there is that in the book as well.

Ian Brown lives in Toronto working at the Globe and Mail. He keeps active, sometimes biking to work when he’s at home. Near the end of the book I started to wonder how many days does he actually stay at home? He travels quite frequently, and mostly for pleasure, although there is some work related travel, such as a month-long stint at Banff as he leads the literary journalism program for the fifth year.

Of course aging is a recurring topic, as is health issues, and studies that show what declines and what point – generally everything sooner than you think, just the results don’t start showing until later. Other topics he keeps returning to is sex, his family (a given) and money, worrying about enough to retire. But the primary topic seems to be his own death is on the horizon.

It's quite the readable book, and well done, especially for a diary, but it’s not just a diary. It was written and edited with an eye to publication from the start.

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