Three Books about Everything by CSLewis, David Rakoff, and Leo Tolstoy

Well, C.S. Lewis is indeed a great writer, although I can't recommend Present Concerns as a starting point. It's really mainly interesting as a window into Lewis's own particular interests, some of which do not seem very contemporary at all: the bad effect that coeducation has had on "serious argument about ideas; why an appalling boarding school is an important experience; the possibility of the elimination of English departments in universities.... Lewis is always literate, always genteel, but sometimes just so idiosyncratic or so much a product of his own times that a collection of ephemera really doesn't hold up all that well.

David Rakoff, on the other hand, is very of the moment. I didn't give him much of a chance, so please feel free to make up your own mind. In my very briefly formed opinion, Rakoff is a great example of that kind of journalism where the reporter is the story, and I'm afraid I just didn't like Rakoff enough to want to read a whole book about him and his adventures. Especially since I did read David Foster Wallace's famous long piece about cruise ships, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." The piece I read by Rakoff just seemed to be doing the same kind of thing only with more crudity, and I just didn't feel like it.

And poor Leo Tolstoy-- I really wanted to like his project, but in my opinion he should have stuck to original writing rather than anthologizing. I might say this collection of excerpts, quotes and original paragraphs was inchoate-- still in a state of preliminary chaos. There were lots of good parts, but they didn't cohere from day to day. The chief difficulty, though, I think is that the selections were not sacred enough to form a devotional, but not secular enough to be attractive to someone who doesn't use devotionals. So the dear old man fell between two stools and ended up with a product that, well, I guess the librarian who bought it liked it...

Spoiler alert: the main topic of the 90s is "Books with interesting bindings". I doubt my library maintains such a collection, and what would be in it, anyway, besides maybe S, that weird novel-within-a-novel that comes packed with inserts...