by Janet Malcolm

I’m not sure why I picked this up, except that it was essays, and I’m sure I thought, “Oh! I love essays”, some of them from the New Yorker and some from NYRB and I’m sure I thought, “Oh! Those will be quality.”

Maybe they were, but they were so very, very dated. I guess it was a nice walk down memory lane as we were reminded of the confirmation hearings for now-Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert’s march to restore sanity, etc.. But the essay about email – what a hoot. “As email’s novelty wears off and its limitations become clearer, we will revert to the telephone…” Ha ha ha!

Essays in the beginning of the book tended to profile people with some unusual vocation or avocation, such as concert pianist or running a rare-print book shop. These weren’t terribly gripping. I have to admit I skipped one about a classic music radio show.

by Amy Liptrot

This is about the author’s alcoholism. She’s from Orkney and returns there for a year when she’s in her 30s or thereabouts and her life has been destroyed by alcohol. Orkney, off the northern tip of the Scottish mainland, is small and isolated to begin with, and she spends a winter on one island that is particularly small and isolated, living alone in a cottage. This is the part of the book that most appealed to me, having Hermit Envy. The descriptions of Orkney only made sense to me because I’ve seen Iceland.