Winter

Knausgaard is a master essayist. He is, for one thing, a regular person. He is a smart person, yes, but not an academic, and he leads a regular life of having to fix things around the house and to take your kids to soccer practice. He is, however, able to look carefully at things and ideas and beliefs, very carefully, almost like taking a zoom lens to them, and flipping them, and looking at them upside down and backwards, and wildly speculating about things, until the reader marvels at the brilliant thoughts that Knausgaard has about perfectly ordinary things.

People keep telling me, in admiring tones, “Oh, you read a Knausgaard book,” as if it were some dense tome of physics or calculus. I urge you to banish that thought. Knausgaard is completely novel, and completely fascinating, but he is also completely readable and applicable.

I can't think of anyone who couldn't read this book and take pleasure in reading it and feel satisfaction in the ideas taken away from the essays.