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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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Grace as It Is in Dürrenmatt’s Once a Greek…
A poverty-stricken, teetotaling, vegetarian religious zealot living in an unnamed central European country—a man of Greek heritage who also happens, in middle age, to be a virgin—places a personals ad seeking a marriage partner. The woman who answers the ad falls in love with him (we can’t at first imagine why), as he with her (this we can easily imagine), and from that point on his fortunes abruptly and radically change for the better. Like all people who have suffered a lifetime of misfortune, Arnolph Archilochos distrusts his good luck, suspecting (correctly) that it’s not what it seems to be.Read More