A Year in Reading: Brian Phillips

This year I grabbed a lot of books almost totally at random and finished most of them, some in a few hours (hello, ’s gorgeously unnerving , which I read in a hotel in Tijuana in the spring), some over many months (looking at you, ’s , an exquisitely boring novel I now meditate upon, helpless, for around two hours a day). I novels. Nominally this was because I was writing about Joan Aiken for , but when you are reading books as delightful as Aiken’s, the whole question of motive begins to seem somewhat beside the point. For instance, you would never say, “I’m leaving this world for a plane of transcendent joy so I can write about it for the .” Or maybe you would, but in that case I harbor grim suspicions about the integrity of your Instagram feed.