Letters arrive at this address from an improbably wide range of places, and I confess I read every one. It was a message from a reader in Seoul last week, though, that put the question more bluntly than most. She was a woman in her thirties, an office worker by trade, and she confessed — with a candour I rather admired — that she used to finish a book a month until sometime in her fourth year at the company, when the habit simply died of neglect. She wanted to know whether it was worth resurrecting. Was reading, in this particular year of our Lord, still a defensible use of a scarce and exhausted hour, when the phone offers so very much for so very little effort? It is a fair question, and I have never had much patience for the sort of answer that meets it with a superior smile, as though the value of literature were too rarefied to explain to the uninitiated. That is the answer of a bore. So let me try instead to give her — and whoever else finds their way to this page, in ...
A Scotsman's long-form essays on Korean and world literature, written from a rain-lashed study in Edinburgh — equal parts close reading, dry wit, and the occasional confession.