Be not deceived: mine is no methodic madness. There’s no art to find my mind’s construction in my choice of reading material. (Okay, there is, but it’s mundane and hardly flatters me.) Most review websites review only new books: they suffer no confusion because commerce is their lodestar. Being poor and a nobody to anybody worth speaking of, commerce also whips me into reviewing some new books, but certainly I am discriminate in which these new books are. In general, I want books whose style is adventuresome, whose subject matter provokes thought or conjures what I’ve never conjured before; my prejudice is to other places, other realities and ways of seeing. It is not that I wouldn’t read stories set in outdoor malls and Wal-Marts and banks—my surroundings are not so condemnable nor is Louis XIV’s court so inherently superior—but I want fiction that doesn’t take this as ordinary, but treats our Wal-marts, fast food joints, office parks, and call centers as mini-chamber dramas wherein store manager Jessica takes on all the dramatic proportions of Richelieu and the Sun King, and memos from Corporate come down with all the force of edicts from the Grand Inquisitor (because for the person on the phone with HR, they do.) To me, the past is neither more glamorous nor more important than this mundane present; all as mundane was the past’s present to those present in the past. (I’m just parroting Hazlitt.) The past rather ennobles the present by making us see that the same struggles for survival and prosperity and dignity and reputation have been the lot of the fortunate and unfortunate in all ages.

But what kinds of books are going to be awake to the historicity of present events? Maybe books by half-forgotten or obscure writers, such as those published in the NY Review Books Classics series or any number of smaller indie presses. Maybe it will be books in translation, such as that published by Europa Editions, New Directions Press, and other similar houses. But in addition, there is much value in crate-digging (to borrow a term from vinyl music connoisseurs) for the literary critic, which in his or her case means searching databases of old texts from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to discover what idle enthusiasms temporarily carried away the public taste, what no-longer-spoken-of writers were loved in those days. There are incredible riches to be uncovered in this way, so many splendid works to be found in the idle mentions and grace notes of better known writers; just the other day I learned of Berthold Auerbach and Jacques Auguste de Thou, the one a 19th century German-Jewish novelist and essayist I heard about while reading Gottfried Keller, the other a 16th century French historian mentioned by John Lathrop Motley as a supreme authority on that period of French history, both writers I hope to read and review in due time, though right now I have been diverted into reading the letters of Madame de Sévigné based on the strong approbation given them by D’Alembert. So you see, I am mostly following breadcrumbs, and so my To Be Read List feels less like an over-towering moonpile than an ever-branching tree.