In March 2020, when the mayor of San Francisco told everyone to stay in their houses, Andrew Sean Greer did what a lot of us did: he ordered books. Not new books. All of Agatha Christie.
Writing in the Guardian this week about the joy of funny writing, the Pulitzer-winning author of Less and Villa Coco remembers that he was far from alone — that plenty of readers buried themselves in dependable stories to shut out the noise. And he lands on a point worth sitting with: it did not matter whether a book ended in a wedding or a corpse. What mattered was that it could be counted on.
That idea keeps surfacing in this week's literary news. We talk about reading as an appetite for the new; look at what actually arrived, and a different engine is running underneath — the pull of a shape we already know.