But more than half of the book is explicitly devoted to books themselves; to life as both a purposeful and a serendipitous reader. “I have no desire to read a book without paragraph breaks,” she writes. They offer the pleasure of personal essays that are more inquisitive and obsessive than self-centered, and they are pitched squarely at readers. They are almost, in the way they spring from and itemize the act of reading, meta-books. One essay here is titled “The Point of Tangency: On Digression,” and one way to describe this collection is as a series of tangents.

Source: New York Times December 19, 2018 18:00 UTC