Sublime

“What our readers hunger for,” I was told by Clifton Fadiman, a pillar of the club’s board of judges from 1944 until his death in 1999, “is books that explain. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich explained a whole age to us.” A majority of the club’s biggest sellers, Fadiman pointed out, have been books that readers found helpf

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

Get in Touch with Your Crayon Box

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” author Neil Gaiman said. “A librarian can bring you back the right one.” 

The eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity within its walls. Its members are almost all obscure individuals whose names present no associations to the mind: they are mostly village lawyers, men in trade, or even persons belonging to the lower classes of society.

The secret is to read chapter introductions and conclusions carefully, and then skim everything else.