Some Sunny Wednesday Mail

[@valpergalit]

“I’d rather have typhoid fever than read this thing” is prime t-shirt material.

[@Jasper-Antonelli]

That Da Vinci book looks interesting!

[@HannahsBooks]

I think you are right that Chernow will be very widely read--partly because of Chernow, but also because Twain is having a moment because of Percival Everett! Even I, resister of long books, is thinking about reading it.

[@Arbutus-v5m]

Sorry to distress you Steve, but Agnes Callard wrote a much-ridiculed essay for the New Yorker which you might remember. "When the philosopher Agnes Callard fell in love with her graduate student, she knew she had to leave her husband. For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had access to a certain “inner experience of love,” a state that made her feel as if there were suddenly a moral grail, a better kind of person to be. . . She now lives with her new husband and her ex-husband, and speaks frankly about the experience in hopes of showing students how philosophy can apply to the most consequential decisions of their lives." If I were you, I'd leave the book outside, open in the rain.

[@crypsid]

The Leonardo book sounds like it's trying to get at something that's at the heart of the Shakespeare authorship controversy for instance, and so it's probably even more up your alley!

[@chuckmoss7414]

Is it a worthy role of a reviewer to do a monthly article on the sorry state of publishing by using, for example, the books here. I was struck by your facial expression, and comments, that the current publishing/author world may need the curmudgeon review. Not the traditional review format, but the comment review process of where have we gone wrong approach.

[@scottjones8100]

It's not just you, at this time of year. "Twist" sounds corny and overwrought to me. Nauseating word-salad.