Françoise Mouly speaks with Sara Sauers, the granddaughter of James Thurber, about Thurber’s cover for the September 4, 2023, issue of The New Yorker, “New Tricks.”
I’ve had the most dreadful year of reading, like many other people I know.
What should have been the year of Ulysses, Proust and the lesser performed Shakespeare plays became, instead, weeks staring vacantly at CNN coverage of the U.S. election offset by 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies and a sneaky addiction to the This Dog Has Now Been Rehomed column on dogsblog.com.
So while I’ve continued to read (good habits are hard to break), very little has really engaged me this year. With two exceptions Hilary Mantel’s glorious The Mirror And The Light, which I savoured over the course of a month, and my current read, Mantel Pieces, her essays on everything from John Osborne to the needlessly controversial Royal Bodies (which enraged David Cameron and Piers Morgan so much they no doubt briefly considered actually reading it).