We had a gorgeous week in September at a cottage in Haliburton, Ontario (essentially the best week of the entire summer). One of the rituals of the cottage holiday and our more extensive travels is the acquisition of the latest Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s the perfect thing for reading that’s broken by swimming, hiking, and looking up to see the sights as your train zooms along. Each issue of these gorgeously produced, perfect-bound magazines is over 200 pages and contains selections from centuries of writing on a particular topic. Past subjects have included War, Love, Nature, The Sea, Politics, Money, and The Future.
Created and edited by the legendary Lewis Lapham (long-time Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s), you’ll find an incredible range of voices in each issue. For example, in the new issue, on Music, the oldest entry is from 600 B.C. (Sappho) and the most recent are original essays commissioned on the theme. Contributors range from Jay-Z to Pope John XXII and from Clara Schumann to Naguib Mahfouz, with stops for thoughts from Thomas Jefferson, Jelly Roll Morton, Plato and Han Yu on the way. The artwork selected to accompany the excerpts spans the same wide gamut. You can move back and forth in the book, dip in and out, read one selection or twenty.
It’s a wonderful way to discover new things to read (in our household, someone has managed to read the Illiad and Odyssey translation by Robert Fagles– no, that would not be me, The Outermost House, Millenium, and more) and to realize the humans have been pretty much the same for the last several thousand years.
As of this year, there’s also a podcast called The World in Time, which I also highly recommend.
Plus, you’ll feel quite clever after reading it.
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