There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

Mr. Frazier makes me laugh out loud.

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.

In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book.

Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.