Sometime around mid-2007, after graduating law school and worrying about a job as Son #2 was in utero, I became culturally irrelevant. Having sold off most of my (non-classical) music and movie collection a couple of years prior, I wasn’t interested in what was going on “artistically” in the world around me, mostly because very little of it sounded or looked like art; it resembled trash. I was dead to contemporary literature as well. After a brief but disastrous flirtation with being an English major in 1998 during my freshman year of college, I had sworn off fiction for almost a decade, though my wife, who double majored in English and Spanish, cajoled me now and again into putting down Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, or whatever philosophical page-turner had caught my fancy to read something — anything — of literary substance. It was nice. However, I quickly realized that I was woefully behind on all of those classics “everyone should read,” and so I told myself, facetiously, that I would get around to folks like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace right after I finished the complete novels of Anthony Trollope. (I haven’t even started yet.) Granted, I’ve made some exceptions here and there. For instance, in 2012 I bought used all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels for a song and proceeded to read them over the course of the summer. Also, during my brief tenure as a New Yorker subscriber, I read a short story or two.
