Charles Taylor -- the Salon critic, not the Liberian dictator -- reviews The Polysyllabic Spree, a new collection of essays by Nick Hornby, and finds a lot to like. Hornby's essays deal with why people read, how they acquire books, and how critics so often fail to capture the joy and serendipity in both finding books and reading them.
Taylor's review struck a chord in me in relation to yesterday's "emo boy" post. Particularly relevant is this passage:
With the supermarket nature of the modern book megastores impeding the interaction of customers, and seeming to offer so much that nearly any choice you make is going to feel wrong, we need to value all the quirks of fate and coincidence that lead us to particular books.
And this:
Saying that "everyone" knows Chekhov is, whether intentionally or not, one of those statements guaranteed to make people feel out of it, to make them feel that culture is a closed circuit to which they can find no point of entry. I'm not advocating the opposite, that idiotic state of affairs where you assume that no one knows anything and even common cultural references have to be identified, for fear of insulting the reader.
Looks like Spree is going on my must-purchase list.