The beginning and end of 2025 Around mid-December, a certain number begins popping up in the various places the literary world communicates today—Bookstagram, Good Reads, Substack, Book Tok, etc. This figure represents the number of books read over the course of the year coming to a close. The number is often accompanied by some variant of the list, such as the top ten best books of the year. I find the list uninteresting—I don’t know you, why would I care what books you like

Book Club I suspect many readers have had the experience of reading a book which inspires the desire to write a book. In my case, it was The Infinity of Lists  by Umberto Eco, for reasons too prosaic to mention. I also suspect many writers write directly or indirectly in response to books they have read. Someone, who might have been George Steiner but I cannot remember, said that most books are responses to other books, that books in a sense converse with one another. I have

The wordsmith finds great joy in identifying the precisely correct word for a particular situation. What to do when that precisely...