Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read? A season’s blockbuster will come out [...] and the world will rush off to the bookstores. More often than not, I dawdle instead, take my own sweet time, probably even stop for a coffee on the way. Maybe I’ll acquire the new book, maybe I won’t.

This isn’t to say that the annual prizewinners and best-sellers aren’t worth Mr. Bigshot Reader’s time or that I think I’m somehow superior to them. On the contrary. I fear that my decreasing interest in the contemporary indicates the onset of old age, or even old fogeyism. Soon I’ll start harrumphing when I open the morning paper.

Only partly to my dismay, I find that nowadays I gravitate increasingly to older books [...]