Citizen Reader

It is Monday, May 7, and that means: It is time to do this Essay Project, people.

Can I get an AMEN from the choir?

That's better.

Now, our essay collection for May 2018 is Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, which is a book consisting of essays he posted in The Believer magazine. Now you should know this about me: I don't really care for The Believer magazine. Any book review publication that doesn't really print negative reviews is emphatically not the kind of book review publication I want to be reading.

But I'm not going to hold that against Hornby. In these essays he looks at his book-buying and book-reading life, month by month, listing the books he buys and the books he actually reads, and what he thinks about those books.

But I'm not here to talk. I'm here to facilitate our discussion on this book to the best of my ability, and to pose questions and invite questions from you as well. For this firstish week of May, I have two questions; you can answer one or both.* The first one's no softball, because let's face it, we are not novices, we are Citizen Readers.

1. What makes something an essay?

And the second one is a softball, because we don't always go in just for the big intellectual stuff.

2. How did you like Hornby's essays in this collection?

Now have at in the comments!**

*And please suggest questions you'd like to ask for next week's discussion of this book.

**This is so exciting!