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I have read this book three times. Each time it has been a different book. The first time I was seventeen, in a high-school American History class in Reedsport, where…

Before Idries Shah, English-speaking readers who wanted to understand Sufism had three kinds of books available to them. They had the nineteenth-century Orientalist studies, written by British colonial scholars who…

An imagined conversation with Daniel Quinn, who died in Houston in 2018 at eighty-two, having lived long enough to see the ecological arguments of Ishmael go from fringe to mainstream…

Hermann Hesse died in Montagnola, Switzerland, in August 1962, at eighty-five, of a cerebral hemorrhage in his sleep. He had won the Nobel Prize fourteen years earlier. He had outlived…

Verdict first: this is the funniest short novel of the eighteenth century, the most widely taught, the most widely mistranslated, and the most widely misread. Read it in a new…

Read this beside Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and you will see the two great American ambition-novels about the Second World War as the secret birthplace of the computer age. Pynchon…

Margin notes from a used paperback I found in Istanbul, a 1980 Penguin edition with the previous owner’s name crossed out on the flyleaf and mine written beneath it in…

Here is the contrarian take, and I am aware it is unfashionable in literary company: The Pillars of the Earth is a better novel than most of the literary fiction…

You cannot read this book properly in a comfortable chair. You have to read it in a place that is slightly wrong — a place where you are a little…

A letter to Henry Miller, who was alive and writing in Big Sur the year I was born and who died when I was eight years old, and whose Black…

I have read this book three times, separated by decades, and every time I have read a different book, and the three books were not always on the same shelf…

Before Foucault’s Pendulum, we did not have the book that predicts the twenty-first century’s conspiracy culture. After it, we did, and nobody noticed, because Umberto Eco buried the prediction inside…

An imagined conversation with Abbie Hoffman, who killed himself in 1989 in a converted turkey coop in rural Pennsylvania, with the Chicago Seven trial thirty years behind him and the…

Rudyard Kipling died in January 1936, in London, at seventy, of a perforated duodenal ulcer he had misdiagnosed for years as a stomach complaint. He was buried in Poet’s Corner…

Verdict first: Coleman Barks’s Rumi is the best-selling poetry in America. It is also not Rumi. Both of these things are true. The book is worth owning anyway. You should…

Read this beside Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and you will see the two directions American science fiction could have gone in the 1970s and chose both. Heinlein published Time…