After posting a riposte to Peggy Noonan's criticism of Bill Gates and his book reviews, I had left a tab open to one of them and went back to it over the weekend. I read a couple of the reviews. It's not wall to wall earth-shattering brilliance, but it does show that here's a guy with a significant life experience who continues to think hard and seek to take in the experience of others to learn and grow.
In fact, at some level I would argue that reading book reviews by almost anyone, perhaps excluding those of professional reviewers in major publications (who are after all in many regards extensions of authors' and publishers' PR machines) is a worthwhile endeavor. Anyone who seeks to ingest long-form content and then offer up their reflections on it to the world is performing a valuable service to the world in general, perhaps simply as an offset to the fetishization of immediacy.
I'm a little bit reminded of my sensation, when I went to hear Boris Gasparov -- my dissertation advisor -- present a paper on Boris Pasternak at Princeton somewhere in the aughts. I was just recovering from academia at the time. What struck me was that the most important thing that was going on in his work was the amount of attention and respect he was showing to Pasternak's experience by reading so closely and thinking so deeply. It's a rare honor to have someone do that. Gasparov and I had coffee afterwards and I shared that thought. I think he may have been offended, but I don't think I was too wide of the mark.
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