Orange Crate Art: Newspapers and novels
Walter Benjamin: “One may, if necessary, read the newspaper while eating. But never a novel. These are two conflicting obligations.”
Travel by plane and book
A passage from Italo Calvino captures what flying always feels like to me: it’s not being anywhere.
“A fairly precise notion of the book”
Calvino anticipates what’s now called “distant reading.”
Reading and writing in the dark
From E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
“Scholarly voracity”
From E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
“Before Amy came in”
Giving up on Henry James.
Q & Q & Q & A
From Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.
Our mutual frown
Our Mutual Friend feels like the work of a tired writer, and it was making us tired.
“Something is missing”
A passage from Absalom, Absalom! that works as a compact reader’s guide.
Jay Bennett (1912–2009)
He wrote one of the best books of my youth
Children, “best readers in the world”
Novelist Katherine Paterson on her readers
Good news, bad news about reading
From the National Endowment for the Humanities: fiction up, overall reading down
Reading don't pay
From Dickens' Bleak House
"It must be a strange state"
Illiteracy in Dickens' Bleak House