This is a rather remarkable book!  I found it while browsing in the Members Only room of the Boston Athenaeum, an independent library founded in 1807 on Beacon Hill.  My membership was a gift from a dear friend and has enabled me to browse the stacks and the Members Only room where I always find surprising books.

Koenig has written a unique book and one which struck so many resonant chords for me.  He describes it in the introduction as a ‘compendium of new words for emotions.  Its mission to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being—all the aache, demons, vibes, joys and urges that are hummig in the background of everyday life…It’s a calming thing to learn there is a word for something you’ve felt all your life but didn’t know was shared by anyone else.”  He goes on to write about language that “We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.”

The book is divided into six sections according to theme:  the outer world, the inner self, the people you know, the people you don’t, the passage of time, and the search for meaning.  All the words in the dictionary, all 311 of them listed in the Index from achenia (“the maddening sense that the world is too complex to even begin to understand, that whenever you try to answer even the most trivial question, it quickly tangles into a thicket of complications and melts into a quicksand of nuance, leaving you flailing for something solid to hold ot to, struggling to come up with anything you could say that is definitively 100% true.”) to zysia (The sense that you were born too early in history, all to aware f how crude and backward the present can be, feeling tired of having to sit through so much clunky exposition and slow-burning suspense, when all you want to do is skip ahead to find our what happens next.”)

Well, you get the idea.  As usual, I read this book with pencil and paper at hand, but gave up after noting the first dozen definitions which I wanted to share and I was only on page 20.  The book is brilliantly creative and entertaining as Koenig draws upon dozens of languages (e.g. Slovenian, Finnish, ancient Greek, etc) to create new words for emotions that we all feel at one time or another.  My own favorite which is featured in Koenig’s superb Ted Talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/john_koenig_beautiful_new_words_to_describe_obscure_emotions?language=en) is Sonder which he defines as ‘the realization that each random passeby is the mai character of their very own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.”

The book is greatly enhanced by lovingly curated epigrams that introduce each section by notables including Czeslaw Milosz (The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness/And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,And for me, now as then, it is too much,/There is too much world.”), D. H. Lawrence (from Studies in Classic American Literature, a book which sat on my desk even as I read that!), Louise Erdrich, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Carlyle, Milan Kundera, and Gwendolyn Brooks.  Each epigram is preceded by a photo collage, many of them by Koenig himself.

As you can tell, I was totally enthralled by this book.  The definitions are entertaining, perceptive, clever, and deeply human.  The epigrams and collages enhance the experience.  Overall, it’s a bit like drinking from a fire hose as the definitions pile up and slip through one’s fingers.  Don’t read this book cover to cover.  Rather, keep it handy and dip into it from time to time.  You will be richly rewarded.