10/2/2023 0 Comments Comic life 3 page landscape![]() White was that magazine’s first fiction editor-she was an early publisher of many famous writers, including E. White describes her gardening habits as “careless,” “lazy,” and “amateur,” but the critical eye and exacting taste that come through in her collected gardening columns for The New Yorker are a delight. Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katharine S. Even if you know nothing about the sport, James conveys its richness-how a batter’s style can reflect both individual personality and a society’s priorities, and how the game effortlessly connects its followers with the wider world. Beyond a Boundary makes the case that cricket is impossible to understand without considering its historical, social, and cultural context in the book’s most ambitious moments, it argues for cricket’s foundational place in modern British history and for its status as a dramatic and visual art. “Cricket,” he writes, “had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it”-in part because class and race tensions on the island played out among its socially stratified clubs. He even credits the sport for his activism. James spent a lifetime steeped in the sport: He disappointed his family by focusing on the game rather than schoolwork, played for a first-class club on Trinidad, and eventually covered cricket as a journalist in England. Less known is his obsession with cricket. James, the Trinidadian scholar, might best be known for his Marxist writings and his advocacy for Caribbean independence. Read: Learn a foreign language before it’s too late “The more I feel imperfect,” she writes, “the more I feel alive.” Every unknown word a jewel.” Beneath her sense of wonder is a deeper argument-that plunging into new skills for the love of them is fundamentally hopeful, even transcendent. But Italian reintroduces mystery, delight, and intensity to her reading: “Every page seems to have a light covering of mist,” she writes. When she begins composing stories in Italian, she’s aware that she will never attain the facility she has in English. The march toward fluency, she admits, is “a continuous trial.” She mixes up similar words such as schiacciare (“crush”) and scacciare (“expel”), uses the wrong prepositions, and can’t quite get the hang of when to use simple or imperfect past tense. ![]() This bilingual series of reflections-the original Italian on the left, an English translation by Ann Goldstein on the right-charts her love affair with the Romance language, from her “indiscreet, absurd longing” upon first hearing it on a trip to Florence to the 20 years of language classes, tutoring, and diligent self-teaching that followed. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome and stopped reading and writing in English in order to immerse herself in Italian. And they so vividly capture the satisfactions of the pursuits they describe that you might be tempted to take up gardening or long-distance running or bookbinding and enlarge your sense of your own capabilities. Look closely enough at any human endeavor, these books suggest, and you’ll find lessons on our relationship to the natural world, to history, to other cultures, and to our own body. The seven books below also describe the experience of becoming absorbed by a skill or craft, and deliver insights into what mundane activities-say, playing sports or learning a foreign language-can tell us about how we live today. What drew me in was its wonderful opening essay, in which Mendelson, a novelist, professor, and lawyer, argues for the importance and dignity of keeping house-an act “that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms.” Although I remain a haphazard housekeeper, I’ve become convinced that housekeeping is both an art and a science, an enterprise whose meaning extends far beyond keeping one’s home clean. First published in 1999, this unlikely best seller contains nearly 900 pages of practical advice-the proper way to wash dishes, the use of furniture paste wax. I credit and blame one book for all of this: Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts. I even recently found myself describing it as “fun.” I have drawn up cleaning schedules, spent far too much time thinking about the relative merits of different fabrics, and become chipper when loading the dishwasher. For the past six months, I have been obsessed with housekeeping-something that, all of my former roommates can attest, I have previously shown neither interest in nor aptitude for.
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