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A note from Russell Baker. I’ve always wanted to keep a large correspondence, animated with letters from friends and strangers, immersed in a to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, events, writerly insights and readerly pursuits. And for a long time I did, although I confess I am only now coming to realize this as, in a […]

Staring out the window after moving house. I stand at the window and watch the storm suffuse the sky, a palette of grays and blacks blending into one another as the heavens concentrate dark power. Twenty-two storeys above the modest streetscape I survey, I see the city hunch its shoulders against the sodden twilight; the […]

Late November brought news of the death, after nearly a century of life, of the historian and literary geographer (“travel writer” sells her short by a long shot) Jan Morris. Among her many splendid books are The World of Venice, one of the richest portraits I know of that oft-portrayed city; Conundrum, an account of her midlife gender […]

Bookshelf autobiography, via an old catalogue. I closed a recent post with a question posed by the philosopher Simone Weil. Happily, she’d also provided an answer. I didn’t reveal that Weil’s words were top of mind because I’d come upon them while flipping through an old copy of A Common Reader. As some of you know, that […]

On Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Thursday night, December 3, we held our last Battle of the Books for 2020. I’d like to share some thoughts about one of the books that was championed (by Kiera Parrot, of the Darien Public Library): Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.  Tan is an artist-storyteller, creator of some of the most imaginative […]

Booksellers on the Seine, in the shadow of a cathedral. Nearly forty years ago, in the first flush of our romance, Margot and I sat at a restaurant table looking out on a scene that had been more or less unchanged for centuries. From where we were perched on the Quai de Montebello, on the […]

Or, history and soliloquy. Even to an inveterate book hound like me, the phone casts a powerful spell. The enervating election drama has only exacerbated its hold. Over the past few weeks, particularly the two running up to November 3rd, I found myself, in the middle of each night, standing in my dark bedroom, feeling […]

In the Strand and other book emporia. “We Need Your Help!” That was the subject line of an email I received on the afternoon of October 23. The body of the message was a letter from Nancy Bass Wyden, proprietor of the Strand bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan. She wrote to Strand […]

Or, The Uses of History. A reading life is a mixture of planning and contingency. The former feeds, with steady purpose, the to-be-read piles we build faithfully around the house, marshaling hope against experience; the latter stumbles upon finds in unexpected settings, distracting us into new interests or magnetizing random thoughts into new patterns of […]

Remembering a writer, reader, and friend. In 2007, some time after the end of A Common Reader, my friend Steve Riggio, then CEO of Barnes & Noble, asked me to start a book review on the company’s website. He gave me the best brief an editor ever had: “Make a site that you and I […]