I really struggled with this. No one writes violence and unrest quite as poetically as Mahfouz, but the unrelenting allegory of it all really bogged me down. It's like the narrative is constantly requiring you to interrogate the biblical / koranic / torahic echoes in every sentence, or else you are reading it wrong. I've put this down last year, thinking that I needed the time and space, but it still wasn't a pleasurable read.

I kind of struggled with the tone of some of the stories, especially when the premise is kitschy yet written about with dead serious literary fiction gravitas. Maybe I just don't have the gene required for metabolizing camp? However, many of the stories, like The Brothers, are incredibly affecting for their precision.

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.

WAT

The story is bogged down by the surfeit of details and breakdown of theoretical scenarios, but it's what you would expect from a playfair mystery. It's bouyed up by the detectives and the basic batpoopery of the plot.