To this day, if a writer's style strikes an echoing chord in me, I'm happy to sit down with almost any kind of book. As 2023 winds down and 2024 prepares to rush in, people quietly reveal their true natures: Some of us look back on the year past, while others look forward to the year to come... There have been times - many, many times - in 2023 when my job, writing about books, has struck me as meaningless and irrelevant. The title of one of Charles Lamb's essays has also started to haunt me: 'The Superannuated Man.' That long word means over the hill, useless, old.
During the last decade, I've tried to resist the growing feeling that modern America no longer cares about what I most value: empathy and respect for others; religious tolerance; knowledge of history; some familiarity with great literature, art and music; a sense of humor; good manners. The late critic Robert Hughes once lamented that ours had become 'a culture of complaint.' Sad to say, complaint is now the least of our troubles.
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