New this week:
HOW TO BREAK UP WITH YOUR PHONE By Catherine Price. (Ten Speed, paper, $12.99.) We’re all addicted. That’s not big news. But are there practical ways to unplug and, as Price puts it, “take back your life”? She has a plan, a 30-day plan. EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON By Kate Bowler. (Random House, $26.) Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School, had a perspective-altering experience at 35 when she learned she had late-stage colon cancer. This is a memoir about her disillusionment with the “prosperity gospel,” that American belief that to good people come only good things. She doesn’t think this anymore. BEING WAGNER By Simon Callow. (Vintage, paper, $16.95.) Author of a monumental biography of Orson Welles, Callow now turns to an equally operatic subject: Richard Wagner, his life and times. BUILDING THE GREAT SOCIETY By Joshua Zeitz. (Viking, $30.) The inner workings of the White House, with its war room intensity, never ceases to capture readers’ attention. Zeitz delves here into Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, capturing both the atmosphere and the advisers (Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti, among others) who made Johnson’s vision a reality. A LITERARY TOUR DE FRANCE By Robert Darnton. (Oxford, $34.95.) Darnton continues his decades-long exploration of how the publishing industry worked in France on the eve of the revolution. Using a trove of documents from a Swiss publisher that smuggled illegal works over the border, he is able to piece together a complex network that put subversive books in the hands of French men and women.
& Noteworthy
In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.
“It is an intimate, often embarrassing thing to read over someone else’s shoulder. (Anyone looking for a quick, effective mortification need only check the marginalia in his college paperbacks.) But certain books are wide and deep enough to deserve docents: George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ is, and Rebecca Mead, a staff writer at The New Yorker, whose MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH I have been plunging through, is a sympathetic guide. ‘Middlemarch’ is both a boulder and a lodestar, a hulking, lengthy exploration of life’s little delights and its disappointments — nominally as experienced by provincial burghers, but really, by us all. Mead weaves in bits of Eliot’s own biography, appreciations of subsequent fans like Virginia Woolf and her own life story. In so doing, she brings what can seem remote in Eliot into the present, and touches on her profound achievement: the way she enters into but also remains above her characters, opening up for examination their innocent folly, their tragic hubris, their gentle goodness and their slippery self-regard.”
— Matthew Schneier, Styles reporter