Currently reading: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen 📚

NB, publishers: describing an author as a “Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist” makes me want to read their book much, much less. 📚

Finished reading: Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

My second read; it’s as beautiful and profound as it was the first time through.📚

I’m heading to Chicago this weekend for a birthday celebration with my father & brother. I’m eager for some bookstore recommendations. Any advice, Chicagoans? 📚

On Brad East’s blog, Denise Levertov’s Good Friday poem “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”:

Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

✝️📚🔗

[Early book collectors] supported the lively culture of book hunting that still goes on, diminished but not dead yet, in the auction houses and antiquarian bookshops of New York, Boston and other cities.

Can this gentle, humane culture survive the attritions of social media and the carceral state? In a way, it already has.

~Anthony Grafton, in an delightful LRB review-essay of Denise Gigante’s new book. 📚

Currently reading: The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk

A gloriously strange book from 17th-century Scotland. 📚

What is mobile is always the most just.

~Robert Walser. So many great sentences in Walser. 📚

Every last silly little thing has its unspeakably swift justification, its good clever grounds.

~Robert Walser in 1907, writing about the Internet 📚

Currently reading: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 📚