I’ve mostly centered my love of e-reading on the Kindle Oasis since it first appeared a decade ago. Sleek grey metal casing, grip-friendly battery bump, handy page-turn buttons … at a stroke, it seemed not only to cure the clunkiness of earlier Kindle models but to leap beyond them into almost Star Trek utility.

Read more

It’s always fun to regard the broiling chaos that churns under the placid exterior of a staid old literary journal like the mighty Times Literary Supplement, and the 21 August is a perfect example. On the surface, it’s a thick, wordy weekly wodge of mostly bookish considerations, but inside, there’s an entire Table of Contents full of fascinating insights, intriguing chestnuts from the past, and plenty of fur-flying arguments.

Read more

I’ve once again spent time recently worrying about land-lubbers, specifically how such non-nautical creatures would react to reading Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels featuring Napoleonic-era British sea captain Jack Aubrey and his best friend Stephen Maturin, doctor and intelligence agent. Like virtually everyone else who’s read the series, I love it passionately and feel oddly defensive about it; it’s not just that I like these books, it’s that over time I’ve come to hate the idea of new readers not liking it.

Read more

“Really big books have a kind of gravitational field of their own,” I opined, not for the first time nor, unbeknownst to me, the last. “They don’t just present a plot and a cast of characters and then get to work telling their story; they throw out a great complicated field of tangles and nuances; they’re free to take their time, increase their demands on their readers, and ultimately achieve a majestic version of their own internal reality than is within the reach of shorter …”

Read more

The other day I found a wonderfully musty old hardcover edition of Dilys Winn’s fantastic 1977 Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion, an oversized and jam-packed thing I’ve been re-reading and loving for half a century. Since my current copy at the time was a spine-broken and dog-eared trade paperback, I was happy to find this old relic so redolent of a long residence in somebody’s basement.

Read more

Some Penguin Classics really should be in “It was Greek to me” territory, and certainly food-writing more than most. After all, I can navigate Greek, but haute cuisine? When my little Schnauzer and I find a dumped box of French fries on the sidewalk, we hunker down and split the loot 50-50. I am not, in other words, a foodie. Literature for foodies should be well beyond the reach of my liking, much less loving.

Read more

Dire warnings and portents abounding about the fraying state of attention spans, the bleak cultural landscape of the “postliterate” age, and I readily believe those portents. I know quite a few young people, and the prevalence of their warning signs in the 21^st century is unmistakable: they vape continuously, they have absolutely no idea of either passion or privacy, and they don’t have even the faintest, most remote ability to concentrate on anything at all for longer than roughly four minutes at a stretch. There’s a sharp irony to the fact that these young people are therefore completely incapable of reading the worrying think-pieces that have been written about them in a variety of magazines in the last few months, but there’s an irony even to the irony, since the young people in question are utterly unable to appreciate even the concept of irony. Unfolding the “postliteracy” drama to young people in 2026 is like trying to teach the violin to a basket full of chocolate chip cookies.

Read more

Boston has recently been char-broiling in a little brother to the truly monstrous heat waves baking the rest of the Western world (except the west coast of Ireland, of course). Day after day, the pleasant warmth of what used to be normal summer weather was swapped out for choking, all-pervasive rampant heat of the kind that turns every minute of every day into a grim trudge in search of some smidgeon of relief, the kind of heat that remains flat on the ground all night long, so that if you need to take your dog on an emergency bathroom break out in the yard at 3 in the morning, your first thought is, “Jeez, it’s hot out here.”

Read more

Since there’s precious little enjoyment to be found in the blaring, galumphing movie itself, I pretty much expected all along that most of the entertainment I’d derive from Christopher Nolan’s new billion-dollar-grossing movie adaptation of The Odyssey would come from commentary and reaction, and I haven’t been disappointed. All indications are that the hullaballoo kicked up by the movie has prompted a great many people to take up the poem itself, to try Homer maybe for the first time, which can only be a good thing. But also good has been the vast amount of Homer discussion that’s cropped up all over the Internet, a particular bit of happy timing for me, since I read the Odyssey every August.

Read more

I recently made an informal pact with two fellow die-hard readers, the idea being that the three of us would embark on a communal reading of Master and Commander, the first installment in Patrick O’Brian’s long-running series of historical novels set during Britain’s war with Napoleon Bonaparte. The series stars an up-and-coming naval commander, Jack Aubrey, and his best friend and Irish surgeon, Stephen Maturin, and unlike the most famous ancestor of a series like this, the seafaring novels of CS Forester, these Aubrey/Maturin novels really need to be read in order of publication: Aubrey and Maturin meet in the first book, and their friendship develops steadily through each succeeding bolume.

Read more

For months now, I’ve had company in the bathroom.

Read more

The other day, I found a three-fold library bulletin from 1960 that had somehow, through one of those unguessable bookish journeys that are so fun to imagine, ended up tucked into an old hardcover that I bought for $1. It’s titled “Outstanding Books of 1960,” and it was issued by the Anoka County Library in Minneapolis nearly 70 years ago, yet here it was, tucked into a random old book plucked from a sale cart of a Boston used bookshop.

Read more

Recently in the pages of the mighty Times Literary Supplement, an academic named Regina Rini wrote a provocative little piece suggesting that maybe the stubborn impenetrability of academic prose constituted a kind of highly specialized professional jargon akin to what you might find in, say, the field of biology. She granted the horrible reputation of academic prose, and by way of example she reminded readers of a piece of this prose that was so bad it won a kind of award for badness: “Indeed, a dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal – of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelian provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm … replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.”

Read more

After the train-wreck of reading a New Yorker article having the lunatic effrontery to draw some kind, any kind of equivalence between the Biden administration and the Trump regime, I needed a refreshing change of pace, preferably without leaving the realm of magazines.

Read more

I expect a steady Upper West Side hum of refined omnivorous intelligence from each successive issue of the New Yorker that arrives in my mailbox, and for many decades, that’s usually what I’ve received.

Read more

“I’ve got it all in black and white,” cries Lady Matilda Carbury with that particular pitch of wounded outrage that can only be achieved by charlatans. “I got it all out of the ‘Biographie Universelle.” Without even seeming to care that she’s outed herself as a simple plagiarist, she goes on: she’ll write a letter to the editor of the paper that has so mercilessly ripped apart her new book, Criminal Queens. She’ll lay out all the facts and figures she cribbed; she’ll insist her letter be published, in order to set the record straight.

Read more

Chapter 1: Cheap at This Price

Read more

Writers of fiction are generally wretched, despicable creatures, greasy, off-putting combinations of neediness and arrogance. They tend to make for company whose tedium is alleviated mainly by the ever-present suspicion of vampirism: since they generally have little or no imaginative talent, they’re always snuffling along the forest floor of their personal relationships for something they can butcher into lame prose.

Read more

Quite accidentally, the “Afterthoughts” column of a recent Times Literary Supplement touched nerve of mine that’s been raw for many decades: academic obscurantism.

Read more

Thanks to the nature of online chatter and the unembarrassed shoddiness of analog subscription mail-outs, I was already well familiar with Rose Horowitch’s much-shared article in the latest issue of the Atlantic, “The Age of Reading is Over,” long before I actually held it in my hands. This is the now-infamous piece in which she speculates that the last few centuries of widespread and steadily-increasing mass literacy might have been some kind of historical anomaly, not the dawn of a new and better age but rather a cultural blip between one long millennium of general illiteracy and the next such millennium. The article arrives like a general salvo after the more narrow sniper-fire of Dwight Garner’s April NYTimes article on the disappearance book reviews; first the reviews go, and now, apparently, the books themselves, or at least their readers, follow.

Read more