Book Post

DUST The pounding and battering go on, day after day, ceaseless. From my window, I watch the crews with their sledgehammers and heavy equipment smashing at the great bridge over the river, pummeling it into ruin. “But why, for what purpose?” I keep asking at my window. “It’s such a great old bridge, a beloved historic landmark of enduring and essential use…

In 2021 Claudia and John Vega, both high school principals with decades of teaching between them and six children in their combined families, decided to make a change.

There’s a sickening pleasure that I associate with reading the crime fiction of James Ellroy. His sentences, all clipped clauses and staccato rhythms, have a feverish, headachy feel, as in this passage from White Jazz: “Lights down. Vibes/drums/ sax/trumpet—go. Themes—loud/fast, soft/slow.” A chapter from American Tabloid opens, “The air conditioner short-circuited and died. Kemper woke up sweaty and congested.” End of paragraph. “He swallowed four Dexedrine.

In the introduction to her new translation of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Bashō’s account of his fifteen-hundred mile walk with his disciple Sora, Meredith McKinney explains that its haibun form, an ancient combination of poetry and prose that Bashō was developing into his own art, consists not so much of faithfully recording places and events…

Screenshot: Fiona Shaw reads the prologue in a production of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with Les Arts Florissants, William Christie, Musical Director. Recorded in 2008 at the Opéra Comique, Paris. “And if the Deity’s above, / Are Victims of the powers of Love, / What must wretched Mortals do.” Last week’s Notebook on books criticism and culture asked some questions about integrity and value that seem sharply contemporary but maybe are not.

Everyone whose life is devoted to books has a small stable of sacred writers, without whose example one might never really have learned to live, and John Berger is one of mine.

I wrote this Notebook for “Viva la Book Review,” a nonprofit that supports book reviews in print, digital, and audio media. A while back I taught an undergraduate course, at intervals over a ten-year period, in “literary journalism,” which I got to define however I liked. I started off with narrative nonfiction, and then I had a little section on opinion writing, and then I moved on to book reviewing. The last time I taught my course, in the teens, I was startled by something new.

Socotra is an island situated between the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden,250 miles off Yemen. The landscape is a geologist’s dream. In its ancient crystalline rocks, limestone plateaus, and a honeycomb of caves, some of the world’s most stunning organisms make their home: a rare warbler, the loggerhead turtle, frankincense and myrrh trees, and perhaps its most prominent species, the dragon’s blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari).

The Complete Notebooks of Albert Camus, skillfully translated and thickly annotated, feels confessional to this reviewer, and may account for my borrowing something of that penitential tone. Why?

The Brontë sisters—none more than Emily—were racked between unbearable contradictions. Their father came from a crowded hovel in Ireland but achieved middle-class respectability as a Church of England clergyman, with a confected surname suggesting the Greek word for thunder and sporting one or another pretentious diacritical mark.