Books

In the early 1990s, when I was a student, I visited an art exhibition with photographs by Sugimoto Hiroshi. It was from a series called Seascapes. The photographs were all in black and white. They had been taken around the world with a view camera, but all showed the same thing: the sea and the sky, with the line of the horizon cutting the picture in two halves. Sometimes it was almost night, sometimes the horizon disappeared in fog, sometimes it was as thin and clear-cut as a pencil line on a white paper. ...

In 2015 I spent many, many hours reading on the web. On Medium, The Atlantic, the NYRB, the LARB, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The NYTimes, etc. But it was also the first year in a very long time, maybe ten years, that I went back to reading a fair number of full-length books, and specifically contemporary novels. I didn’t take notes on any of these books, and I’m not sure I remember them all very well, but I thought I’d do a quick roundup anyway. ...