My job as a book critic used to elicit envy at cocktail parties, with people fantasising about a life spent reading. Now it’s more likely to trigger sheepish admissions from partygoers about not reading as much as they’d like to — as if I’m going to spring a pop quiz on Moby-Dick.
Long gone are the days when James Joyce’s Ulysses was a man-magnet, as the Irish novelist Anne Enright reminisced to me on a panel marking the book’s centenary in 2022. My own college bookshelf featured a copy of David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page Infinite Jest with similar aims.
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