The excellent Travel Memoir Review celebrates books old and new. I recently wrote about Etchings in an Hourglass, the concluding memoir in a trilogy by Kate Simon, one of America’s great unsung writers. https://travelmemoir.review/2026/01/22/etchings-in-an-hourglass-book-review/
Reviewing Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading in The Spectator (Oct. 28), Charlotte Stroud presented her own reasons for reading, which had nothing to do with finding greater empathy or, God forbid, relatable characters. “I want to see,” she wrote, “what C.S. Lewis calls ‘the myriad eyes’ of literature. So if a reason to read must be given, it is that books are one of the few things in this world that meet our hunger for more life.”
It’s banned books week, which is encouraging. Aldous Huxley worried about a world in which books had become so insignificant they weren’t worth banning.
I’m off on a little road trip, culminating Thursday with a conversation about my memoir at The Lynx, the Gainesville bookstore started by Lauren Groff in support of banned books. Back here next Monday.
PS: My book is not banned.
I got back from New York City at 2:30 am Friday – with a cold. But apart from that, and the midtown gridlock that made I-95 look like a country road in Montana (the UN General Assembly was in session), and the hotel room that reminded me of a Thurber drawing (“A hotel room in Louisville”), it was a pleasant trip. I didn’t do much; I was unusually focused on preparing for my talk, which was attended by people who appear in various chapters of my memoir. Hence my anxiousness; it’s easier to talk to a hundred strangers than to a roomful of friends and acquaintances. But the talk went well, and afterwards I reconnected with old colleagues, some of whom I hadn’t seen since 1978. One of the joys of publishing a memoir.
Yesterday evening I was reading a review of a new book, A Short History of Stupidity (“Why is it short?” Hania asked) in which the reviewer questioned the wisdom of Einstein. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. The reviewer, Tibor Fischer, wrote: “As someone who asked beautiful girls to dance in my youth, I did get different results.”