What I'm Reading/In the Book Review
The pile has been edited a bit: I’ve removed all the unopened books. The week’s big read, Beginner’s Greek, spent a night or two in the pile — no more — but never made it into a group picture. The bad thing about a treat like Beginner’s Greek is that it spoils both one’s taste and one’s appetite. It’s a good thing, I suppose, that such books don’t come along very often, because I should never get anything done if they did.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that neither the Prexy nor the Veep reads for pleasure, but — Condoleezza Rice? According to Jacob Heilbrunn’s review of Elisabeth Bumiller’s new biography, the Secretary of State was so excessively force-fed books as a child that — but I can’t bring myself to excuse or explain such an appalling failing. To give up reading for pleasure is to set one’s imagination out to pasture. It is a form of self-mutilation. Better never to have been a reader in the first place.
As for this week’s Book Review: