Book reviewer

It's turned into a cold, rainy Saturday after a balmy Friday-after-Thanksgiving. I tried to make up for having had to work in a corporate office building yesterday by driving all the way home with the driver's side window rolled down. Today is a more typical Northern Hemisphere autumn-to-winter day.

I accomplished a number of tasks this morning, including finding someone to light the Advent candle tomorrow. I also have a number of gifts to buy today, so, naturally, I first went to a bookstore. Naturally, I found books that interested me, too, including discovering an author/book reviewer I didn't know of, senior editor of the Washington Post Book World (free registration required), Michael Dirda. I picked up his book Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments about books, reading, authors, libraries, bookstores, his Beloved Spouse and children, and buying books(!).

Then I came home and looked up Dirda's writing online: his reviews, including tomorrow's review of Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems, and an archive of his weekly online discussions. I see that he also has just published another book, Bound to Please.

Pleasures of a book reviewer: to open a new book tentatively, with indifference even, and to find oneself yet again in thrall—to a writer's prose, to a thriller's plot, to a thinker's mind. Let the whole wide world crumble, so long as I can read another page. And then another after that. And then a hundred more. (Readings, p. 13)