Back at the Wheel

Wrapping up our little pause

Strips (quilt), Annie May Young (c. 1975), one of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Hello Readers!

I am well and truly back. For those just joining, I took a little breather in posting new pieces recently while I recalibrated after seven or so hectic years of newslettering. (Book Post was actually born on Substack before it was even a thing. Hamish McKenzie, one of the founders, told me recently that we were among the first ten. We shared an inaugural impulse to protect writing from the mass devaluation of the internet.)

The good news is that when I wrote to you a few weeks ago worrying a bit about our future, you came back to me with a resounding persevere! Those of you who did much more than that, I won’t embarrass you, but thank you. I came on here wanting to bring readers lots of writers and books, but since I am absolutely committed to paying writers for their work (see above) I have come to realize we need to be a little more, shall we say, moderate in our pacing if we want to be sustainable. So for the time being, slowing things down a tad.

Why even review books, you ask, as the ramparts shudder. Why spend time on this?

As the British journalist and critic Rebecca West wrote in 1915, “Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind.”

Books (and I do not require that they be between covers, only that they be the product of long labor, that they be committed to, that they be enduring, and made of language) are where our most consequential and considered ideas lie. They are the refuge of civilization. By examining books we consider what we mean to endure, what we wish to pass on, what others have felt and thought before and beyond us, what we have to turn to in order to advance our understanding, cultivate our souls, and recognize each other more fully, our store of ideas for making things better. Thinking about books, in the plural, is a way of thinking about what matters.