Translation and Its Discontents
Two translations of the same Russian sentence sit on my desk, and they do not agree about the weather. On the impossible, necessary art.
Review: The MANIAC, by Benjamin Labatut
Labatut’s von Neumann is a man who mistook the universe for a problem set. A review of a novel that is not quite a novel, about a mind that was not quite a comfort.
On Reading Slowly
Speed was never the point. A defense of the fifteen-page evening, the paragraph read twice, and the book that takes a season.
A Year of Reading, Loosely Counted
Fifty-one books, or maybe forty-seven, depending on what counts. The annual accounting, done badly on purpose.
What the Library Knew
The card catalog at the Rochambeau branch knew things about my neighborhood that no database has learned since.
Against the Infinite Scroll
The feed has no last page, and that is the whole design. On endings as a form of respect, and why I want my reading to run out.
Rereading Middlemarch in October
The third time through Eliot’s Middlemarch, and the first time I noticed who the book was actually about. Some novels wait for you to grow into them.
Notes on a Commonplace Book
Three rules for keeping a commonplace book, all of which I break, and one which I keep.
The Bookstore at Closing Time
Eleven years of turning the sign to CLOSED. What a used bookstore sounds like in its last half hour, and what the register tape never recorded.
Why I Still Write in the Margins
A pencil, a paperback, and the argument for talking back to books. On the long conversation a reader carries on in the white space at the edge of the page.