Adam Gopnik's third lecture considers the making of the modern Christmas, winter's holiday. He describes it as a "profoundly compound festival" and discusses its origins. It marries "not just many different pagan holidays but also the two chief kinds of festivals that exist in the world: the reversal festival and
"Baseball – what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around." Chad Harbach's debut novel shares its title with a guide to playing baseball, which includes meditative observations on the art of life itself. It's a
1. Remarkable wrangling with world-changing matters: racism. (Most of what I say below is about this: but there are other fine reasons too.) 2. Southern US setting (Many readers know and love Southern fiction, but this isn't Mississippi: it's Arkansas. That's refreshing. Even if Chess does think it's boring!) "I
"If you just read one book this year, read this one." Perhaps more than any other book I've read this year, Monoculture makes me want to say that. Which is ironic: because Monoculture is about one story. (And I know how much you all love to read stories.) The premise
Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie's Aya de Yopougon Trans. Helge Dascher Gallimard, 2005 978-2-07-057311-7 (Available as Aya in English) Over the past summer, I was exploring library branches that I had never visited before and it was at one of those that I made Aya’s acquaintance.This new bookish territory not only took
