The New York Review of Books contains reviews written at great length by people who wish they had written the book in question and are slightly bitter about it.
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The NYRB is not so much a magazine or journal as it is a time or style of one’s life. If you’re reading it, you’re also reading the weekly NYT book review, and perhaps the Washington Post book review and you’re reading masses of books and writing letters to your friends about the books you’re reading, and generating huge amounts of postal material going back and forth– copies of notes, copies of books. The world itself sort of recedes and one lives in a haze of thoughts and concepts and ruminations. It’s like becoming a pensive, sedentary human cow. The desk where one sits, and one rarely sits anywhere else, is full of books in piles and towers, papers slosh about the place, the dishes are never clean, the postman always rings the bell because there is too much to fit in the mailbox, and holes in the elbows manifest themselves and remain unpatched unless a tender and forgiving spouse happens to notice and deal with them.
To break free of the New York Review of Books and the satellite publications and that whole style of life is not an easy thing. One does it deliberately, determinedly and with the knowledge that Things Will Be Different. And they will, eventually. But like kicking any habit or drug– and this is much more like the latter– it takes time, perhaps a year or two, to settle into a new mode of living, and to forget the feelings of the past.
I speak from experience, and I caution any who think of idly picking up the NYRB in an unthinking moment, to think again, lest one fall into the dark pit of the literary…