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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 have forgotten much of the plot. There is a scene in Anna Karenina I have carried with me for years. Nothing much happens. No one dies, no great confession is made. Two people sit at a table and trace a few letters in chalk. Levin and Kitty have already failed once at understanding each other. Between them now lies everything that has happened since: embarrassment, regret, pride, and all those things we don’t manage to say. ...

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 person enduring what seems like an endless internal conflict. Perhaps the greatest punishment we can receive is the one we impose upon ourselves, and Rodion Raskolnikov has done so in many ways. I nonetheless have a peculiar way of approaching Dostoyevsky. While Raskolnikov lies in bed lamenting and suffering alone, I cannot help thinking about what else must be done. Suffering may reveal the conscience, but it does not necessarily repair the harm. ...

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 read several of them. Some are better than others. Some mattered deeply at one point in my life and then receded. Others I admire more than I love. Lists like that always tempt us to believe that reading is cumulative, that it works by completion, by coverage. As if one could finish literature. But novels do not really work that way. They are not milestones so much as encounters. And encounters depend on timing, on who one is, on what one is carrying at that moment. ...

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 agree that the first true novel was Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I had known this for a while, but never really explored why—or what that meant at the time. In this course, professor Leo Damrosch, an expert in literature, guides us through these questions with a rare clarity. He reminds us to approach them from a distance, aware that we belong to a different culture and time. We inevitably bring our own lens to the discussion, yet must also imagine how the people of that era understood these issues. ...

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 leap. You convert words—abstract symbols—into images, sensations, and meaning. It is one of the most complex mental operations we’re capable of, and it doesn’t happen passively. You have to train for it. Reading fiction, especially the literary kind, is not effortless consumption; it is deliberate imagination.1 ...

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 that we really, really admire, and love and feel some kind of a resonance with because the work itself is fantastic, but there’s another level to what they make when you know the backstory […] There are a lot of people whose work I admire that I think partly what brought me to them, in some ways, is knowing that backstory. – Merlin Mann, Back to Work Episode #84 - Every Genie is an Actuary. As Feynman spoke once of the science knowledge of a flower,1 I restate here in another context. There are many interesting questions that come from the knowledge of the backstory of the work of those we admire, which only adds to the excitement and mystery of the work itself. I don’t understand how it subtracts. ...

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 young human girl finds herself orphan because of an earthquake. Her survival instincts are put to test at their maximum, but she knows very little of surviving on her own. This desolate picture changes when she is rescued by a group of Neanderthals, the “clan of the cave bear”. She looks like them a bit, but at the same time she is too different to be accepted without it raising a few concerns. ...