Wednesday, September 25, 2024

#92: Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

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I’d never heard of the writer who went by the pen name Novalis until I recently read about him in two quite different books. The first bo...
Tuesday, February 13, 2024

#91: Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen

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In The Martian Chronicles , a 1950 novel by Ray Bradbury, humans have settled Mars—not the airless rock we know from science, but a mythic p...
Tuesday, July 18, 2023

#90: The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk

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At the end of a positive but somewhat perfunctory review of The Books of Jacob in the New York Times, Dwight Garner writes The Books of ...
Wednesday, December 14, 2022

# 89: Everybody: A Book About Freedom, by Olivia Laing

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A few years ago I read about something called ASMR: “autonomous sensory meridian response.” Wikipedia defines it as “the subjective experien...
Thursday, May 5, 2022

#88: Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

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Flights is an enigmatic book. It’s quite readable and even rather charming, and yet when you finish it you’re not quite sure what you just ...
Sunday, February 27, 2022

#87: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

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I might never have picked this book up if it hadn’t been for the title. Hamnet was the name of William Shakespeare’s only son, who was born ...
Monday, September 13, 2021

#86: The Master, by Colm Tóibín

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The Master , by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, dramatizes various events from the life of author Henry James (1843 – 1916). The first chapter i...