a reader’s progress

Once again the New York Times seems to have roiled the literary pond

Once again the New York Times seems to have roiled the literary pond, provoking, depending on your disposition, screeches of indignation or snarls of ridicule. The occasion for the rising noise level being the lame-assed (I guess I am tipping my hand here) attempt to name the best American novel of the past 25 years. …

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12 Reasons for the Death of Small and Independent Bookstores

To sink to the old good news/bad news routine, Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore is closing its doors after 29 years. Vince McCaffrey lays out his view of the objective conditions that led to this final closing: Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent bookstores Ever thankful to those who made the effort before …

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March 17, 2004: “Far be it for me to step in the large pile of turds that Mel Gibson has left behind”

Far be it for me to step in the large pile of turds that Mel Gibson has left behind with his deft marketing of his deity-inspired rendering of Christian mythology. As Joseph Epstein replied when I queried him about his intentions to weigh in, it would require him to see the movie, which he was …

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February 25, 2004: “I was going to write about the unrefined thoughts…”

I was going to write about the unrefined thoughts I had on the passing of Golden Age of TV icon Jack Paar. Which involved some teleportation back, against time's arrows, to the past, when television was Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bill and Kukla Fran and Ollie and Studs Terkel (this was in Chicago) and Dave …

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February 8, 2004: “Regular garden-variety cantankerousness”

Regular garden-variety cantankerousness—now regularly euphemized as “contrariness” or “curmudgeonly behavior”—is responsible for my life-long (as least adult life) disregard of the Justinian calendar. The lapse in my attention to my journal was superceded by the end of the annual end-of-the-year hysteria that has firmly rooted itself in the American culture—it might be thus in other …

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December 1, 2003: “Despite industrial imperatives that focus on current releases…”

Despite industrial imperatives that focus on current releases with the hopes of creating bestsellers, hopefully in the giga proportions of Harry Potter, there are occasional reminders that the literary moment is not coincident with the commercial one. Jonathan Yardley's "Second Reading" columns in the Washington Post are some of those. Recently Yardley revisited the prodigious …

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