The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, by Jenny Uglow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 588 pp.) Social media and smart phones have made face-to-face interaction passé. It was not always so. Jenny Uglow reminds us that in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, people formed clubs of all …Continue Reading »
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner, 1925, 180 pp.) Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is one of those artists whose tragic life has become in some ways more famous than his creations. He was a founding member of the Lost Generation of (mostly) expatriate writers who flourished in the 1920s and ’30s, and who …Continue Reading »
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon, 1994, 237 pp.) Writing, someone once said, is easy. Just sit down and wait for the blood to pour out of your forehead. Mark Twain said that to write, all you had to do was cross out the wrong words. This is …Continue Reading »
Time Enough at Last Every so often, I’ll take a break from discussing the book I’m currently reading and give long-suffering followers a welcome respite. In these intervals, we’ll talk about the reading life more broadly, perusing weighty issues about reading, to wit: how do we find more time to read? This is a question …Continue Reading »
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, by Steve Brusatte (William Morrow, 2018, 404 pp.) I’ve never read a book about dinosaurs. Growing up, I was never very good at (or interested in) science, though like everyone else I went to see Jurassic Park on the big screen …Continue Reading »