More like 3.5, but I did thoroughly enjoy myself as I was reading it. There's an added layer of interest in the marginalia that the TFG folk have added, since this is a traveling book passed around within the book club. It's actually quite fitting, since a lot of Fadiman's preoccupations stem from the ancillary elements of a reading life, as opposed to the actual words themselves.

What comes out of these fleshed out blog posts are genial ruminations that are enamored with of an old notion of what it is to be a reader. Which is great enough. But I feel like she brings up interesting premises that don't get the pages they deserve. I get more immersed in the essays by Daniel Mendelsohn or Elif Batuman, for example. She also reveals herself to be irrationally dismissive of contemporary life, in a way that she doesn't truly address. But nuance gets filtered out of nostalgia, I guess.