Reading in the Dark Months
December reading is its own genre: long Russian novels, ghost stories, anything with snow in it. Notes from the solstice shelf.
The Quiet Web
Somewhere under the feeds, the old web is still there: sites made by one person, updated when they have something to say. Field notes from the quiet web.
Review: Playground, by Richard Powers
Powers writes the ocean the way other novelists write childhood. A review of Playground, a novel about coral reefs, computation, and what we drown.
My Grandmother’s Dictionary
A 1953 Webster’s with a cracked spine and one word underlined in red. What we inherit when we inherit someone’s words.
In Defense of Difficult Books
Difficulty is not a tax the reader pays; sometimes it is the content itself. Against the frictionless book, and the review culture that demands it.
Letters I Never Sent
A shoebox of unsent letters, 1991 to 2009. On the strange genre of the letter written to be finished rather than mailed.
The Tyranny of the To-Be-Read Pile
The pile on the nightstand is not a queue, it is a mood board. A short note in defense of buying books you may never read.
Review: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
Sixteen sunrises a day and nothing happens, gloriously. On Samantha Harvey’s slim novel of six astronauts and one blue planet.
Second-Hand Inscriptions
For Margaret, Christmas 1974 — who was Margaret, and why did she give the book away? An essay on the messages that outlive their occasions.
Walking as Punctuation
A sentence needs commas and a day needs walks. On the ambulatory semicolon: the walk that joins two unrelated thoughts and makes them a paragraph.