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My Year in Books (2015)
I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction.Read More
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Graveside in Damascus
In the recently released A Levant Journal, translated by Roderick Beaton from the Greek of Nobel Prize winning poet George Seferis, the great poet visits the grave of Jane Digby (a.k.a. “Ianthe”) in Damascus. As so often in his journals, Seferis produces what amounts to a prose poem—a brief description full of suggestive disturbances. He is incapable, it seems, of shallow writing. It was getting dark, a wind was blowing. Between the grave and the surrounding wall was a great walnut tree heavy with ripening fruit.Read More