Download Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year AudioBook Free
"This is actually the thing, the thing is: I am on my way to being an old man. But at 60, I am still the youngest of old men." As Ian Brown's 60th birthday loomed, every instant seemed to present an option: confront or deny the biological simple fact that the end was now closer than the beginning. True, he was beginning to notice recollection lapses, creaking legs, and a certain communal invisibility - and yet it stressed him that many people think of 60 as "old", because he rarely felt over the age of he had at 40. An award-winning article writer, Brown instead chose to notice every instant, try to understand it, catch it...all without panicking. Sixty is the result: Brown's uncensored account of his 61st season and, prepared by his reportorial items, his investigation of the many changes - physical, mental, and psychological - that come to all of us as we age. Brown is a grasp of the seriocomic, and his day-to-day dramas - as a spouse, father, brother, son, friend, and neighbor - are rendered, inseparably, with wistfulness and laugh-out-loud wit. He's also a discerning, prolific audience, which is a genuine pleasure being privy to his applying for grants the dozens of freelance writers - including Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, AJ Liebling, Wislawa Szymborska, Clive James, Sharon Olds, and Karl Ove Knausgaard - who speak to him most at 60. From an writer on whom the showing information is never lost, Sixty is a richly useful, candid survey from the range between middle-aged and soon-to-be older. It perfectly catches the obsessions of any generation realizing that they are no more young.
