One sure sign that a reader has reached old age is that he or she loses interest in new fiction. Seen it all. Been there, done that. It’s then that people nearly always do return to the books they loved when young, hoping for a breath of springtime as the autumn winds blow. And if they aren’t rereading “Treasure Island” or “The Secret Garden”? Then it’s likely to be the Bible, Plato’s dialogues or Montaigne’s essays because these inexhaustible classics address nothing less than the meaning of life, which really means, of course, the meaning of our own lives.
When Times New Roman started trending on Twitter yesterday, the books world began to panic. Had Comic Sans escaped? Had the sans serifs risen up against their pointy overlords and Tipp-Exed them out?
No. The author Sean Richardson had asked the internet to “reveal the deepest part of yourself: Which font and which size do you write in?”, little realising he was about to open a Pandora’s box of preference and prejudice.
It sounds almost like science fiction: a tiny world that formed around another star, visiting our cosmic neighborhood for us to study. And yet that’s exactly what has happened, twice now as of the last few months. It will only happen more often this decade.
So maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss food snaps (though let’s be real: a lot of it is mundane). “Man is what he eats,” the 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feurbach wrote. And also, what he photographs.
Followers is no romantic comedy, and Angelo clearly doesn’t mean it to be, but it’s a satire in which scraps of optimism drift down the streets of Manhattan like torn and trampled flyers. Orla might have been an author, the novel suggests, and her clubbing roommate Floss—a young woman with a truly glorious voice—might have become a singer, and the two of them might even have found true love, if not for a sparkly prize that dangles at a much closer reach. Each wants to be special, but they settle for getting famous instead.
Mazel Tov recounts the years that Margot – a Belgian atheist of Catholic background and probing disposition – spent tutoring the children of the Antwerp-based Schneider family. She first came to them in the late 1980s as a miniskirt-wearing student, wholly ignorant of their way of life; decades later she remains in contact with them all.