[books] why. why am I like this.

So. I did not manage to finish The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat before it disappeared back into the ether, and onward to the next person in the 23-deep queue for the single digital copy my library has.

I told myself if I didn't manage to finish it by the time my two weeks was up then I could officially Did Not Finish it and leave it at that. And yet, somehow, inexplicably, I have ended up asking the internet to send me a second-hand copy.

(It does not hurt that Tales from Out There*: The Barkley Marathons* is -- or at least was -- available second-hand from the same place for like half what it was last time I looked, when the supply-demand proposition had for some reason become decidedly skewed, from a place that was doing buy-one-get-one-10%-off.)

This is a book that was first published in 1985, containing material that had been published piecemeal over some number of preceding years; a new edition in 2013 left the main body of the text intact but added a preface discussing ways in which language and attitudes and technology had moved on and rendered the actual contents decidedly out-of-date.

(The prose is... I struggle with it. I would unconstructively characterise it as The Worst Stereotypes Of Philosophy Students, but am at least managing self-awareness to the extent of going "hmm, is this what my preferred modes of communication sound like to people who aren't intimately familiar with my particular preferred sub-fields for jargon, which I am deploying in my desire to be Clear And Precise".)

It's a landmark in the modern practice of case histories. Every other popular medicine book of the last forty years is inescapably in dialogue with it. If absolutely nothing else, my brain is currently finding the pop-med case-history format both soothing and useful.

But goodness, I stalled hard on the opening paragraph of the introduction to the second section:

'Deficit', we have said, is neurology's favourite word -- its only word, indeed, for any disturbance of function. Either the function (like a capacitor or fuse) is normal -- or it is defective or faulty: what other possibility is there for a mechanistic neurology, which is essentially a system of capacities and connections?

Which if absolutely nothing else seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of a mechanistic model of neurology, and it's not (at this point) clear to me whether this description is of the model as its originator intended or if the simplification is coming from Sacks himself.

Possibly I will go digging, if I don't lose interest and wander off to something else.

This isn't really a review, and it definitely isn't a recommendation. But I have, as I say, gone and bought a copy so I can finish it after all. More to follow, perhaps.