After a few halting words of greeting, he left most of the going to us, only occasionally interjecting a positive comment (“Very fine, very fine”) or a negative one (“Very difficult, very difficult”), from which it soon became clear that he had not the faintest idea what we were talking about.
This is wonderful, as are Pico Iyer’s descriptions of Iceland and Ethiopia, but after an hour or two with the “Great Journeys” series, reading Chekhov’s bulletins from Siberia and Olaudah Equiano on “the galling of the chains” in a slave ship, these magazine features hardly seem like works of necessity; or rather, the necessity that produced them is a journalistic one, a need to be entertaining and readable. And given that they are entertaining and readable, perhaps we should pardon their authors if they seem at times less interested in “piercing the veneer of things” than in adding a glossy layer of their own.
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Books
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, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, George Saunders, Ernest Shackleton, Marco Polo, Isabella Bird, Andre Dubus, Pico Iyer, Less
