Good Taste
To acquire good taste seems effortless, yet many spend a lifetime eating overcooked pasta untroubled by it. We learn to cook by imitation, much as we learn to write. But how can we expect anyone to pr…
Book
Encounters We Carry Within
There are moments in novels that I remember less for what happened than for what passed between two characters. They stay with me long after other parts of the novel have faded; sometimes even after I…
On Suffering
I have been reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky over the past few weeks. More than a novel, it is a psychological journey. Dostoyevsky manages to place the reader inside the mind of a p…
Something no list can rank
I came across the above image today. One of those neat, confident grids listing the “Top 100 novels.” A canon in miniature. Ambitious, serious, well argued. I recognized many of the spines. I have rea…
An archetype of human experience
I’m listening to The Rise of the Novel from The Great Courses—a fascinating journey through a genre we take for granted today, yet which wasn’t always part of our cultural landscape. Many scholars agr…
Why reading fiction is different
There is something to be said about reading fiction—it is fundamentally different from watching TV, movies, Netflix, or scrolling through Twitter and TikTok. When you read, your mind has to make a lea…
It makes a difference to know the backstory
selbstporträt by Vincent van Gogh . I think that everybody, to get the screaming out of their heads do different things […] beautiful losers and genius lunatics […] there are people who make things th…
On the human intellect and prehistoric people
photo by JackVersloot. I recently finished reading “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean M. Auel . It is a beautiful story of the human struggle for survival. In the time of mammoths and cave lions, a y…