I read a lot of 'The Canterbury Tales' on my phone last year, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.

Sadness is simply something to be treated with antidepressant meds and otherwise need not be spoken of.

There is no right or wrong reading of Naked Lunch, though some readings are more common, and thus Burroughs commercial is not the issue.