The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Reviews

• 
  Kelsey (munnyreads)

  Out of the two dictionaries I've read in the last year, this one is definitely my favorite.
  
  And a word for bookworms; Ringlorn:
  
  "adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales-a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don't matter."
• 
  s.penkevich

  ‘This is a dictionary—a poem about everything.’
  
  Sometimes we are caught in an abstract feeling, some seemingly inexpressible vibe or mindset that hovers right on the cusp of language best explored by poets equipped with imagery and metaphor to cast a shadow of its shape in our minds. 12 years in the making, and originating as a podcast and youtube channel, John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows aims to harness these emotions with language in order to better talk about them. Collected here are neologisms, all completely coined by Koenig based on research into word etymology, with the etymology of each new word explained as well as definitions for the obscure or abstract emotions denoted by the invented word. It is a lovely linguistic exercise that hones in on feeling we’ve all likely experienced but never had a word for and to see them collected here makes the reader feel much less alone knowing these abstract emotions are rather universal. Divided into six sections, each with a mini essay, and photography that is whimsical and beautiful, this is a fascinating and fun existential foray that word lovers should not miss.
  
  You may have heard the term sonder, one that Koenig coined, that did come into use on social media for awhile, and it would be cool to see many of these getting usage. I could see the poets enjoying trying these out.
  
  Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
  
  Koenig’s descriptions of each emotion get quite poetic, and his words lull you into the specific feeling in a wonderful way. They range from fun and silly to somber and dark as he explores all the corners of the human existence. Here’s a favorite:
  
  Ringlorn: adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales-a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don't matter."
  
  It would be a shame, however, to learn reading this will give you ‘aimonimia’: n. ‘the fear that learning the name of something—a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger—will somehow ruin it, inadvertently transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, leaving one less mystery flutter around in the universe.’
  French aimer, to love + nom, name. A palindrome. Pronounced “eym-uh-nohm-ee-uh.”
  
  But it is wonderful to hear him ramble about language and emotions, especially how much it dips into existential moments of existence ‘Emotions are none of these. As a result, there’s a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don’t even know we’re missing. 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.’
  
  But check out some other fun ones:
  Anchorage: n. The desire to hold on to time as it passes.
  Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookstores.
  Hanker sore: adj. Finding a person so attractive it actually kinda pisses you off.
  Aulasy: n. The sadness that there’s no way to convey a powerful memory to people who weren’t there at the time.
  Backmasking: n. The instinctive tendency to see someone as you knew them in their youth.
  Grayshift: n. The tendency of future goals and benchmarks to feel huge when viewed in advance, only to fade into banality as soon as you’ve achieved them.
  Nilous: adj. Anxious to imagine how many times you must’ve barely avoided catastrophe.
  Proluctance: n. The paradoxical urge to avoid doing something you’ve been looking forward to
  
  This is a must for word lovers. Though hopefully with all my praise your own reading of it won’t give you ‘the wends’: the frustration that you're not enjoying an experience as much as you should, which prompts you to try plugging in various thought combinations to trigger anything more intense that roaring static, as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations.
  
  Flichtish: adj.nervously aware how much of your self-image is based on untested assumptions about yourself—only ever guessing how you’d react to a violent threat, a sudden windfall, a huge responsibility, or being told to do something you knew was wrong.
  
  Wenbane: adj. feeling small and alone while walking the streets of an unfamiliar city, swept along in the commercial bustle of asphalt and neow, dwarfed by impenetrable monoliths looming high overhead, brushed aside by pulses of traffic carrying on their daily business, with nobody willing to look you in the eye except for the posters encrusted on subway walls, each of them pitching at someone other than you.
  From wen, an enormous congested city that swells like a cyst + bane, an affliction or poison.
• 
  Alexander Peterhans

  "This is a dictionary—a poem about everything."
  
  Based on a podcast that I haven't heard, this is a dictionary of newly created words, that try to capture something of the human experience heretofor uncaptured.
  
  The lazy comparison is of course with Douglas Adams' and John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff, a similar idea but more concerned with being funny.
  
  fensiveness
  n. A knee-jerk territorial reaction when a friend displays a casual interest in one of your obsessions.
  Mandarin 粉絲 (fěnsī), fan, admirer + English defensiveness.
  Pronounced “fen-siv-nis.”
  
  That's not to say this dictionary isn't funny - it certainly is. But the whole is more draped in a blanket of melancholy. Vonnegut's "so it goes" very much applies here.
  
  Most of the words and definitions chimed with me, a couple didn't (so it goes).
  
  hanker sore
  adj. Finding a person so attractive it actually kinda pisses you off.
  From hanker, to pine after something + canker sore, which gets worse the more you’re aware of it.
  
  Each word is described succinctly, but lyrically. Then a short explanation is given of the new word's etymology - mostly two existing words (from various languages) that are gently portmanteau'd. Then a pronunciation guide is given.
  
  Inbetween sections of words, there are longer essays, diving deeper into selected words. I wasn't a fan of these - they tend to overexplain ideas, where the shorter definitions have more punch. It's also where the overal writing style started to grate with me - there is a glibness in the writing, that at times works beautifully, at other times slips on its own oiliness.
  
  proluctance
  n. The paradoxical urge to avoid doing something you’ve been looking forward to—opening a decisive letter, meeting up with a friend who’s finally back in town, reading a new book from your favorite author—perpetually waiting around for the right state of mind, stretching out the bliss of anticipation as long as you can.
  Latin pro-, forward + English reluctance.
  Pronounced “proh-luhk-tuhns.”
  
  There are also intermittent illustrations that, to be completely honest, did not do a lot for me.
  
  "Such is life. Some days you wake up in Kansas, and some days in Oz."
  
  All that said, there is much here to delight the melancholic reader.
  
  (Thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC through Edelweiss)
• 
  Gerhard

  karanoian.
  the terror of the blank page, which can feel both liberating and confining, in both the limitlessness of its potential and the looseness of its boundaries.
  Japanese 空の (kara-no), blank. Pronounced “kar-uh-noi-uh.”
  
  Officially one of the weirdest books I have ever read, and I have read some pretty weird shit in my time. Rest assured though that this is a ‘good’ weird book. I am sure John Koenig can conjure up a word for that particular feeling.
  
  I had no idea the book actually started out as a website and was a 12-year project that eventually became a New York Times bestseller. [On that note, people say they don’t read poetry because it is too ‘difficult’, yet a book as, er, obscure as this sells in droves? Go figure].
  
  Anyone who works with language in a professional capacity, such as a writer, communicator (or reader, for that matter) knows what a strange and unruly beast language is. “Perhaps we should think of language as a tool of inception, as if we’re scanning a drawer full of keys, wondering which one will open the most doors into other people's heads.”
  
  This book certainly achieves that. However, if you think about it logically, it should not work at all. Koenig is not making up a language here, which at least requires rules and consistency. He is just cobbling bits and pieces of words from different languages together to make ‘new’ words, most for unrelatable feelings and emotions (which, I suppose, distinguishes it from a project like Urban Dictionary.)
  
  I tried to dip into this randomly but found that wasn’t working for me. Reading this cover to cover, on the other hand, induced a kind of hushed and revelatory melancholia that saw me passing from new word to new word as if they were objects to be paid reverence and homage.
  
  As Koenig concludes:
  
  Sometimes I wonder if the dictionary itself should never have been invented in the first place, because it gives us a misleading impression of what gives words their meaning, and how stable that meaning really is. By conveying an artificial sense of consensus, dictionaries make it all too easy to believe that our words define us, instead of the other way around.
• 
  Story

  ⭐️All ⭐️ the ⭐️ stars ⭐️ in ⭐️ the ⭐️ universe⭐️ for⭐️ this⭐️ artfully⭐️ beautiful⭐️ masterpiece⭐️
• 
  Ray Nessly

  Read July 2022. Edited & "recycled" Sept. 2022
  
  4.5 stars ... (Speaking of which:)
  
  star-stuck
  adj. Exhausted by endless reviews and secondhand impressions; itching to stumble blindly into the world and make some mistakes, to wander around opening doors to restaurants and performances and movies you’ve never heard of, without the slightest idea of what to expect.
  From star, a standard rating unit of reviews + stuck.
  --John Koenig
  
  
  
  The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows opens with this quote:
  “I read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
  --Steven Wright
  
  I quite liked this book. It's a collection of words, a poem about ... well, not everything, but about words of a particular kind. These are definitions of emotions, invariably melancholic ones (as fits the title), previously undescribed. Some are existing words that were repurposed, such as "skidding" and the name Fitzcarraldo--borrowed from a Werner Herzog film--or Idlewild, the original name of JFK airport. But the vast majority are words invented by the creative mind of John Koening. At their best, they resemble prose poems. For me, it is a book best read slowly, a few pages a day. The words are grouped not alphabetically, but by category (eg.,‘Between Living and Dreaming’and ‘Roll the Bones’), with an accompanying essay to open each section. Occasionally, I felt these essays went on a bit too long. But mostly they are fine. No dis to Koenig, the best essays are those by guests, David Foster Wallace and Milan Kundera, hard acts to follow.
  
  Getting another minor quibble out of the way … In a few cases I may have detected some repetition among the entries, pairs of twins or almost twins. For example ...
  
  dolonia: a state of unease prompted by people who seem to like you too much, which makes you wonder if they must have you confused with someone else—someone flawless, selfless, or easy to understand from a distance
  
  immerensis: the maddening inability to understand the reasons why someone loves you—almost as if you’re selling them a used car that you know has a ton of problems … but no matter how much you try to warn them, they seem all the more eager to hop behind the wheel and see where this puppy can go.
  
  Both are perplexed/uneasy, that people ignore your flaws/problems, and they like you/love you anyway, right? Now, maybe there are nuances here that escaped me. But they tempt me to coin a word. Or two (because: irony). My words are:
  
  Deja Too: the unease that you’ve just spotted twins. (Twins are unsettling, a bit weird, no? ... Oh it's just me? Fine.)
  and ...
  Doppler-gänger, from Doppler shift+ doppelgänger: that uncomfortable jolt to your world view and sense of self when you think you've spotted, in the distance, your twin (!) but then he gets closer and .... but I digress just a tiny bit.
  
  The following are a few of my favorite entries, wherein all the components excel. The term itself, and its definition, origin, and pronunciation, are all intrinsically interesting and/or whimsical, and/or are as pleasing and necessary to the brain, eyes, and ears, as music, as poetry.
  And they fill a hole in our vocabulary. In each case, I go, ‘Yea, Koenig’s right. The world needs these words.' Or I do anyway.
  
  plata rasa: n.The lulling sound of a running dishwasher, whose steady maternal shushing somehow puts you completely at peace with not having circumnavigated anything solo.
  Latin plata, plate + rasa, blank or scraped clean. Pronounced “pla-tuh-rah-suh.”
  
  mal de coucou: n. A condition in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help you flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which can eventually progress into a state of acute social malnutrition, where even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.
  French mal, ache+ de coucou, of the cuckoo bird. Coucou is also a French colloquialism for ‘Hey there!” Mal de coucou is a riff on the term mal de caribou, also known as rabbit starvation, in which you can starve to death even with unlimited access to lean meats like rabbit and caribou, after eating an excess of protein and not enough fat.
  
  rubatosis: n. The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, whose tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome than a nervous ditty your heart is tapping to itself, as if to casually remind the outside world, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
  In music, tempo rubato, “stolen time” …
  
  aimonimia n. The fear that learning the name of something—a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger—will somehow ruin it, inadvertently transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, leaving one less mystery to flutter around in the universe.
  French aimer, to love + nom, name. A palindrome.
  
  (bonus points for being a palindrome.)
  
  Other top favorites: pax latrina, star-stuck, tichloch, wollah, drisson.
  
  Btw, this book reminded me of Lost in Translation, a fascinating collection of foreign words.
  
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
  Examples:
  Pisanzapra (noun), Malay-- The time needed to eat a banana.
  
  Komorebi (noun), Japanese-- The sunlight that filters through the leaves of tree.
  
  Poronkusema (noun), Finnish-- The distance a reindeer can comfortably travel before taking a break.
  
  Aren't those great? I think for anyone interested in Koenig's book, it's a fine pairing.
  -------
  Footnote:
  I’m likely to get this from the library again or buy it. I’ve listed my favorites. For the benefit on my future self --my twin, my doppelgänger, my time-continuum(s) buddy-- here are some next-tier words and their pg. numbers that I’d likely want to revisit:
  8 looseleft 15 la cuna, 46 emodox, 47 nighthawk & giltwrights, 48 deep gut, 50 keep, 52 endzoned, 57 proluctance, 75 POVism, 86 incidental contact high, 90 skidding, 95 redesis, 100 falesia, 102 foilsick, 116 antiophobia, 117 hanker sore, 124 hailbound, 130 burn upon reenty, 137 siso, 141 silience, 151 heartmoor, 154 poggled 179 lap year, 230 arroia & knellish, 235 nilous, 238 karanoia (the terror of the blank page!), 242 tornomov
• 
  L Ann

  A beautiful collection of words that reads differently than a normal dictionary in that it is deeply introspective, creating words for deeply human feelings or experiences that are hard to put into words. Here are a few of my favorites:
  
  aulasy n. the sadness that there’s no way to convey a powerful memory to people who weren’t there at the time - driving past your childhood home to show it to a friend, or pointing to a picture of a loved one you lost, only to realize that to them it’s just another house, just another face.
  
  heartworm n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
  
  watashiato n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.
  
  wildred adj. feeling the haunting solitude of extremely remote places- a clearing in the forest, a windswept field of snow, a rest area in the middle of nowhere - which makes you feel like you’ve just intruded on a conversation that had nothing to do with you, where even the gravel beneath your feel and the trees overhead are holding themselves back to a pointed, inhospitable silence.
  
  ringlorn adj. the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales - a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.
• 
  Julie

  My favorite parts of this book is where John Koenig explores further rather than providing his word and a definition only. For example, he writes about how each person we interact with "only ever sees [us] in isolated context inhabiting certain roles at certain times," which made me think.
  
  Furthermore, "each of their impressions may be accurate in the moment, but each only reflects a narrow band of the full spectrum of you." This is so true and I often wonder whether we can truly 'know' another person.
  
  I appreciated Koenig's explanation of how some people live in the shadow of others who have stronger personalities, or perhaps express themselves more confidently. He writes that they are a "neutral gray reflecting strong colors nearby."
  
  Humans are so complex and fascinating. There is always something new to learn. We are also unpredictable and surprising. "Whenever you stumble upon a new situation it's hard to predict which version of you is going to emerge or which opinion is going to tumble out from the gumball machine in your head knowing that it will carry the sheen of truth, as if all your other thoughts did not exist." Sometimes I wonder at the unexpected words that come out of my own mouth in response!
  
  Finally, in the chapter titled, 'Montage of Attractions' Koenig quotes from The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich, "You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart."
  
  This was a very enjoyable listen and I found the author narrator's voice soothing.
  
  
• 
  Crystal King

  A beautiful, strange book, that reads a little differently than a dictionary in that it meanders and muses and dives deep into emotions in a way that a regular dictionary could never do. But there is no narrative, so if one is expecting a thread to run through them all, they may be disappointed, but lovers of words and of language will find this to be a truly delightful addition to their bookshelves.
• 
  Soula Kosti

  It's wonderful and so fulfilling to be able to put a feeling or thought into words and John Koenig helps us do just that in "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows."
  
  This book would make a great addition to every library and bookcase; a book that you can pull off the self whenever you're feeling like it, when you're so lost in your thoughts and feelings and want to find the answers for all those emotions within the pages of a book.
  
  Koenig helps us see through these word entries that we're not alone; that our intrusive thoughts do not belong exclusively to us (like klexos: when we're dwelling on the past) and that unexpected things occur for all of us (like how we've all experienced a moment of tangency: a fleeting glimpse of what might have been).
  
  What I mainly liked in this book:
  
  - The fitting way the words are split into sections
  - The use of imagery throughout the book
  - The use of quotes in the beginning of each chapter/section
  - The pronunciation guide for each word and the mention of the language of origin
  
  Can't wait to purchase a print copy of this beautiful book to add to my collection!
  
  Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
• 
  Kim Lockhart

  This is the culmination of a long-running project: the creation of words and phrases to describe emotional situations for which we have no language. I had not previously thought about what huge gaps we have in our lexicon, when it cones to expressing how we feel. Imagine what release it might be for the flustered and frustrated, if they could (sorry for the cliché) "use their words."
  
  This is long overdue, fascinating, and eminently valuable.
  
  Many thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with an uncorrected proof copy, whereby I could peruse this treasure at my leisure. This is the kind of book you may wish to own, much like a dictionary, when you need a way to articulate how you feel and how you think things are going in your life.
• 
  Bandit

  If you love words and believe that a language is an ever-evolving thing of beauty, this is a book for you.
  English, for all its simplicity, is an insufficient language when it comes to emotional intelligence representation. There are simply too many notions, moods, and obscure sorrows for which there are no words…well, for which they weren’t any words until John Koenig came along and made them up.
  Joining the esteemed ranks of Shakespeare, More, Milton, and others, Koenig has been coning the words to describe all the things that used to take paragraphs to describe before for a while now through his website. Eventually, he accumulated enough of them for a dictionary…hence, this dictionary.
  Obscure sorrows presuppose a certain melancholy tone and sure enough, there are many ways to be sad and say sad it in this book. Most of them are devastatingly elegant and strikingly clever. These words have a meaning, they have etymology, they don’t just exist, they deserve to exist.
  And I really wish more of them stuck to the walls of my memory palace, because I would like to just casually toss them into the world now and then.
  But then again, how often do you just sit down and read a dictionary? Not often enough, likely. This is no conventional dictionary – some entries get pages of description. Poetic in a way. Only not as pretentious and wonky as most modern poetry. Just kind of…meditative. Thought of the state of being sort of thing. Either way, it’s a perfectly readable dictionary. And for word lovers out there, it’s an absolute delight of a read. Recommended.
  
  This and more at
  https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/
• 
  Maryna Ponomaryova

  UPD: написала
  
  https://marinkopon.medium.com/the-dic...
  
  Обожнюю обожнюю обожнюю. Я пам’ятаю як ця книга зароджувалась на тамблері, як ці дефініції потрапляли у вирій і люди відчували те саме, малювали фанарти. Це дуже інтимна книга про близькі досвіди, і всі ті пазлики з яких складається життя. Чи ці слова вигадані чи реальні? Чи не всі слова вигадані, чи не всі емоціі реальні? Хочу написати детальний допис кудись на медіум про цю книгу.
  
  
• 
  Mohamed Hasn

  What are you waiting for? You better read this ❤️"while the language is still alive, while the words still have meaning."
  
• 
  Burak

  John Koenig'in bu kitapla aynı adı taşıyan blogunu ve Youtube kanalını uzun süredir takip ediyorum. Dolayısıyla bu kitaba başlarken neyle karşılaşacağımın farkındaydım, hayal kırıklığına da uğramadım.
  
  Var olduğunu bildiğimiz ancak henüz onu tanımlayan bir kelimeye sahip olmayan nesneler, duygular, olaylar için kelimeler yaratma fikri şimdiye kadar çok defa kullanılsa da hala etkileyiciliğini koruyor bence. Koenig de bu işi şüphesiz iyi yapıyor. Kitapla ilgili bir sorunum bazı tanımları okurken bir kişisel gelişim kitabı okuyormuş gibi hissetmem oldu. Sözlüğün amacıyla çok da uyuşmuyor bence bu. Bir de başından sonuna aralıksız okunacak bir kitap değil The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Aralıklarla alınıp birkaç sayfa okunması, sonra bir süre ara verilmesi, bazen alakasız sayfaların karıştırılması gerekiyor; yani bir sözlük nasıl kullanılıyorsa bu kitap da öyle okunmalı sanırım. Ben yıl bitmeden bitirmek için biraz zorladım kendimi ve üst üste tanımlar okumak oldukça yorucu bir deneyimmiş.
  
  Koenig'in özellikle giriş ve kapanış yazılarını çok sevdim, dille ve kelimelerle olan ilişkimiz üzerine güzel şeyler söylüyor. Dediğim gibi ara sıra içini karıştırıp bir şeyler okuyacağım kitaplardan biri olacak bu da. Umarım Türkçeye çevrildiğini de görürüz.
• 
  Maddie

  The time has sadly come that I have finished this book (dictionary?). This was so frickin good I can't think of very many words to describe it. I think every single person should read this and see how the author is able to explain human emotions and experiences. It is honestly pretty profound to me how he is able to capture the essence of being human in such short definitions. Really gets you in your feels. Very non-fiction John Green-esque writing (which you know I love but do with that information as you will)... he was also the only person to blurb it on the back. Anyways I'm really surprised I hadn't heard more about this book before reading it because it is simply the epitome of what I love to see in a book. no notes.
  
  Anyways if you are interested here are some of my favorite words:
  
  the wends: the frustration that you're not enjoying an experience as much as you should, which prompts you to try plugging in various thought combinations to trigger anything more intense that roaring static, as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations.
  
  midding: the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it- hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, talking quietly outside a party, resting your eyes in the back seat of a car listening to friends chatting up front-feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be
  
  
• 
  Craig

  My only complaint is that it is not longer.
• 
  Douglas Summers-Stay

  This is a listing of words the author has invented. That sounds easy to do, but the trick is to do it so well. I don't know anything about John Koenig, but he clearly knows and loves words in many languages for their own sake, and has an ear for what makes a good definition and the perfect word to evoke that definition.
  He's very cleverly chosen to define words whose meaning is a previously unnamed feeling. It makes the whole project a spiritualy meaningful one in a way that naming deep-sea fish or fast-food flavors could never be.
  I don't think I'm breaking new critical ground when I say that literary short stories in the 20th century tended to climax with an epiphany-- a realization about one's own life, something that illuminates what it means to be human, something that resonates with the reader and the author as well as the character. This book is all epiphanies, distilled, condensed, and refined into something new and intense.
  Too intense to take at one sitting. It would be like eating an entire box of chocolates at once. Each one needs to be savored. When he mentioned the joy at getting on a train without a phone and being completely cut off from all responsibilities and ties to the world for a few hours, I remembered a train from Ljubljana to Thessaloniki where I felt just that. Each definition evokes a specific bittersweet memory or two, something I never thought whether another human being had shared.
  I first heard of the blog where these definitions were first posted in tracing the origin of the word "sonder" which is apparently the only word from the list which has been adopted more widely. Sonder is the feeling you get when you realize that every lit window you see on the distant hill is person at the center of their own story, someone who might have become your best friend or bitterest enemy if you had happened to live a little closer. I first felt it when I was about 11 years old, standing alone on the wooded hill at the back of my block, looking out at houses whose inhabitants I would probably never meet, even though they lived within a five minute walk from my house.
  It's a perfect little book of poetry in its own way.
• 
  Lou Kemp

  First off, this is not a dictionary. Nor is it a plot driven book.
  (I received an advance copy of this book, but this review is purely my opinion)
  The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is neither fiction or non-fiction, but something in between to stir a reader's senses and imagination. More precisely, the author loves words, and as he embroiders new meanings to unknown words he brings them either down to a new level, or up into the sky as he adds the "what if?" to the thread of thought. At the same time, the prose soothes what worries, or terrifies the reader. If a professional hypnotist needed a bible, this could be it.
  Example: Heartworm
  "n. a relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire. (from heart + earworm, a catchy piece of music that completely loops inside your head)"
  This illustrates how things in the book are connected, and sometimes become children of a phrase, or sometimes just whimsy. But, the entire book is whimsy and well worth sinking into---especially the section on not being afraid.
  
• 
  Jessica (a GREAT read)

  So I first found out about John Koenig's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from Stephanie Garber's Instagram post! I looked into it and it sounded intriguing! This is basically a small dictionary of words that may or may not be real, based on your own opinion, yet they describe the incredibly real feelings we've all had at some point!
  
  It's kind of hard to review what is essentially a choice dictionary. Not all words are in here. But it's a compilation of inexplicable feelings we get. Some of them tend to have a somber tone, reflecting on memories of the past, of lost love, of lost chances or some such thing. While they weren't necessarily dark and dreary, they also weren't overly chipper either. It truly was just that kind of tone or feeling you get you get when you remember your childhood best friend you haven't seen in years. It's more about remembering those happy years and the brief wondering of what happened...we grew up.
  
  I'll admit that some of the organization of these choice words and feelings were a bit lost on me. There were times I didn't see the trend or pattern. But I also read this a few words at a time over the course of two weeks or so.
  
  This is definitely a nifty little book for the creative or writerly types, as the description claims. I thought reading this could help get my own writing niche started up again. In some sense it has, but it's also still holiday time so finding time where I can finish reading inspirational writing material AND getting back to my own writing is pushing it for family gatherings. Lol. So hopefully in the new year I can get back to my own writing. And even if you're not the writing type, this was still an intriguing read as I never thought to have an actual word to describe the unusual, and yes, obscure feelings you get from time to time.
  
  
  Overall Rating 4/5 stars
• 
  Irene

  This book is absolutely beautiful. Koenig gives name to many of the feelings and thoughts we have in our daily lives, the little epiphanies and the big, the joys, the insecurities, the things that make us human, which sometimes feel entirely alienating, when in fact, other people feel them too.
  
  I listened to the audiobook I got today after recommending it to the three library branches I use (find out if there's more than one library system in your area, it's improved my life exponentially). Luckily they got it in right away. Koenig's reading is wonderful. I first found out about him through his YouTube channel, and I think his reading of the text adds to it. Still, I can't wait to get my physical copy so I can annotate it. I'm already planning to re-read it next year, and take my time with it the second time. This is a supremely re-readable book.
• 
  Norhan Mahmoud

  Oh how cathartic this read was ❤️
• 
  Marty Mangold

  This really is a dictionary, though not alphabetical. There are sections that suggest topic areas, but I had no sense of narrative progress until nearing the end. The ending sections clarify the idea behind adding new words to our language: expanding our sphere of awareness. I enjoyed it from the start, but with that understood I enjoyed it very much. The art work, much of it by the author, is delightful.
• 
  Caffeinated Fae

  The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is one of those books that is a bit hard to read and stay engaged. It literally is a dictionary, so make sure to pace yourself. I really enjoyed the words & I loved that language is fluid and that hopefully, we'll see people use some of these new words in the future. My big issue with this book is that some of them already exist. I know that definitions change (think thong as in undergarments and thong as a flip-flop shoe), but if you're already making up words, why not do something new and not try to change the definition of a word? I also have a love/hate relationship with how the book was formatted. I loved that the words were broken into sections, but I still struggled with them not being alphabetized. But, at the end of the day, I enjoyed this book and loved most of the new words. I'm glad I read this book, and I'll definitely keep a copy to look through.
• 
  Mehwish Mughal

  I followed the YouTube channel "The dictionary of obscure sorrows"- a really soothing and magical place where John Koenig transformed some of the things I felt but wasn't sure how to make sense of it.
  
  I bought the book as soon as it became available and wanted to finish it in one sitting. As you would want to do if you wanted to unlock all the magic at once. Wasn't able to digest it in big chunks though and ended up feeling a bit disconnected - how can one read a dictionary in a day?
  
  It is meant to be read slowly and deliberately. Kept as a companion on the shelf.
  
  Here is an experience out of the many I highlighted but the one that spoke to me the most:
  "the sadness of realizing that you're already forgetting sense memories of the departed - already struggling to hear their voice, picture the exact shade of their eyes, or call to mind the quirky little gestures you once knew by heart"
• 
  Lisa

  Interesting book but I wish there were a non-white-male version of this. What about the word for being female and being treated or referred to as property? What is the word for those ‘mini-rapes’ when you know a man is mentally undressing you as he looks at you? What about the word for subtle belittlement because of one’s background or beliefs? What are the words for all the many feelings individuals experience who don’t share a common skin color or cultural background? Love the idea of this but too many of the concepts were kind of first-world issues. Real to many I’m sure but seemed a bit too superficial for the deep things experienced by many others. I’d love to see something like this work tackle more challenging ‘words’.
• 
  Ruba Maher

  I just can't with this book.!
  Thank you, John Koenig, for giving voice to something I've felt all my life!
  I want to always keep a copy of the book near me just to remind myself that I'm not really alone in the universe, and there are thousands of people who feel the same yet they can't express what they feel. And now we all have that shared atmosphere of camaraderie and our special lexicon.
  I want to dedicate this amazing dictionary to everyone who's feeling that no one in the world would understand what he/she feels.
  
  Here's to our mutual sense of comradeship 🥂
• 
  Selene

  This stretches the genre of dictionary to also encompass poetry. I’ve been following the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as a blog for years and years. I’ve always thought it was a beautiful project. As an incredibly sensitive and as described by many people in my life as “overly” emotional, I found such solace and comfort in this project. I’m so grateful to have a physical copy.
• 
  Joyce

  John Koenig has an incredible way with words. As I read this dictionary, I was so excited to be able to put words to feelings I've felt and experiences I've lived through. Some made me cry, some made me laugh, but regardless, this was a beautifully crafted work of art.