In other words, I've slowly taken back a slice of my day that for far too long belonged to work for no other reason than I let it. I even start my workdays a little earlier than I used to, if only to eke out time for my glorious midday break.
But the book’s real strength is not its crime-solving (Fischer concludes with a plausible if not provable suspect); it’s the way Fischer, who is also a film producer, helps us see how revelatory motion pictures were at the time.
Once you let go and allow the story to sweep you away, you’ll see how absolutely dazzling it really is. Author Sheila Williams takes readers on a sort of adventure in the beginning, before plunging us into a horror story that’s told with a voice that’s mournful but calm and proud.
Portable Magic is a love song to the book as a physical object. In tactile prose Smith reminds us of the thrills and spills of shabby covers, the illicit delight of writing in margins when you have been told not to and the guilty joy that comes from poring over traces left by someone else. It is these haptic, visceral and even slightly seedy pleasures of “bookhood” that she brings so brilliantly to life.
In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement”, the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.