The story of being a reader is often a story of being surprised in a bookstore. It’s where Zeno first heard of Socrates, and where Nietzsche learned of Schopenhauer. In 1916, the critic Carl Van Doren was in a used bookstore when he spotted Herman Melville’s forgotten 1851 novel, “Moby-Dick,” a happy accident that resurrected what’s now recognized as one of America’s greatest novels. Many of the books I love most and recommend most fervently were books I stumbled upon. I didn’t realize I needed a smirking handbook to the American class system until I spotted Paul Fussell’s “Class,” didn’t know how satisfying the Western could be till I spied “Lonesome Dove,” didn’t know James Baldwin till I found a cheap paperback of “Giovanni’s Room.” We find our favorite books in the same way we often find our closest friends, brought together by circumstances that are unexpected but somehow true to our personalities.
The thing is, now that restaurants are opening back up, I think we better understand our true relationship with them. We connect more to their original purpose. The word “restaurant” has its roots in the French word “restaurer,” which means to “restore or refresh.” As I’ve sat in dining rooms again, I’ve remembered just that: Restaurants restore our bodies with food, but they also provide a space for us to gain perspective on our day. They allow us to separate from the usual spaces and see things from a different point of view. They give us license to eat too much, drink too much and, somewhere along the way, reconnect with the better angels of our nature.
We just need to make sure our better angels wear a mask, keep their distance and tip our servers well.
The email arrived on my second day as the theater reporter here at The New York Times. It was March 10, 2015, and a publicist from the Public Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit, was welcoming me to the beat. “I think one of the best ways to get to know the Public right now is to come see HAMILTON,” she wrote. (For reasons I have yet to understand, theater publicists generally put show titles in all caps.)
I went to a matinee five days later, and in the five years since, I’ve written more than 100 articles that prominently mention the show. It goes without saying that “Hamilton,” which explores America’s revolutionary origins through the life of Alexander Hamilton, has dominated my tenure — I’ve never known the theater beat without it, and until the coronavirus pandemic prompted an unimaginably long shutdown of Broadway, I thought it would be the biggest theater story I’d ever cover.
I’ve never cared for multiperspective books (well, “As I Lay Dying,” but Faulkner set the bar high): Just as you’re getting comfortable with one persona, in comes the next. But though Katherine Hill works one character at a time — portrait by portrait, psyche by psyche, time frame by time frame — in her novel “A Short Move,” she crafts a deftly detached third person to speak with one voice.
each tree sticks itself upward dark into light or light’s the medium
for each to define itself aslant against air saturated with water
pixelated molecules diffusing the already diffused source of light
so few here, so few houses, few on the street, the homeless cyclist
four times in one day
just because that
ending was fucking
sublime and i cried