On January 1, 1660, a British man in his late 20s, with a promising career in naval administration ahead of him, began to keep a diary. He wrote in shorthand, occasionally incorporating other languages when his subject matter – usually […]
Roger Scruton’s The Meaning Of Conservatism
by on February 26, 2016
I have lately undergone a personal upheaval, brought about by a change in my political convictions. For most of my teenage years, I took no interest in politics, viewing the whole messy business of governance with a great deal of […]
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
by on February 19, 2016
Midway through J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, I had to pause to check its date of publication; it seemed so fresh, so relevant to contemporary issues, and yet it was published in 1999, nearly two decades ago. Consider the book’s protagonist, David Lurie, […]
Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art
by on February 18, 2016
The Spooky Art is the first book by Norman Mailer I have read, which, when you consider his quondam literary fame, seems rather odd, except that his reputation – at least among readers of my generation – has fallen significantly. […]
E.E. Cummings’ 95 Poems
by on February 13, 2016
There is a playful strangeness central to the appeal of E.E. Cummings, one that has sustained his reputation over the last half-century, even as other, greater poets have become less widely read. But this same playfulness belies his formal difficulties […]
Desiderius Erasmus’ The Praise Of Folly
by on February 5, 2016
An apocryphal story, relayed in the introduction to the Princeton Classics edition of Desiderius Erasmus’ The Praise Of Folly, describes the first meeting between Erasmus and Thomas More, during which the two men, as yet unknown to each other, have a […]
Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See
by on January 31, 2016
Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer prize-winning novel All The Light We Cannot See manages a difficult balancing act. First, and most conspicuously, are the multiple narratives. There is Marie-Laure LeBlance, a young, blind girl, and her devoted father, a locksmith and tinkerer, who […]
Mary Oliver’s Felicity
by on January 28, 2016
First, a heartfelt thanks to my aunt Sandra and her family for gifting me Felicity and introducing me to Mary Oliver. The New York Times describes her as America’s best-selling poet, and Felicity seems to me ample proof of why: her verses are simple, poignant […]
W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
by on January 19, 2016
At some point in humanity’s evolution, spurred on by an abundance of meat and the discovery of fire and cooking, which enabled us to digest more of our food’s nutrients, our brain volume trebled. Greater intelligence meant more sophisticated tools, agriculture, […]
Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning Of Human Existence
by on January 15, 2016
I have a certain bias to confess at the outset of this piece. There is, at present, a war of ideas being fought over the future of social studies. On the one hand are the self-styled “sociologists,” the current rulers […]
Charles Lamb’s Selected Prose
by on January 15, 2016
Charles Lamb was just 21 years old when his elder sister, in a fit of madness, stabbed his mother through the heart with a kitchen knife. He arrived on the bloody scene just in time to wrench the blade from […]
Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser
by on December 31, 2015
A fanatic, it is commonly observed, is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser is narrated by a nameless fanatic, a piano virtuoso who comes to understand the limits of his own abilities when […]
Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet
by on December 30, 2015
Two major themes in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet resonate with me to a degree I find unnerving. The first is the experience of finding reality fall short of the standards set by the imagination. If we are to take Pessoa […]
Roger Kimball’s Experiments Against Reality
by on December 27, 2015
The slogan of the Enlightenment, as declared by Kant, was Sapere aude – dare to know! Our post-modernist culture has done one better, however, producing such luminaries as the celebrated academic Richard Rorty, whose motto might best be summed up as […]
Garth Risk Hallberg’s City On Fire
by on November 30, 2015
No single book released in 2015 has been more anticipated than Garth Risk Hallberg’s City On Fire, which is quite a statement when you consider that Harper Lee, Jonathan Franzen and Clarice Lispector all saw major releases this year. For my […]