In response to yesterday's post, I received an email from my friend Tom Rayfiel in which he highly recommends Thomas Love Peacock's novels--Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle, Gryll Grange--and also pointed out that Peacock was George Meredith's father-in-law . . . which at the very least gives rise to conjectures about that non-historical personage known as Peacock's daughter.

Tom's email reminded me that I haven't mentioned his small essay on Nabokov, which appears in the "Table Talk" section of the current Threepenny Review. I love Tom's essays because they remind me of my own essays . . . which, I hope, is not as selfish and self-serving as it sounds. What I mean is that he writes about literature from a similar place in his brain: the nonscholar/serious-reader/regular-curious-human-being sphere. And even though we don't necessarily read or write about the same books, I feel as if we're puttering along parallel paths. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of his essay:

Six dollars, used. We never talk about this but I think it's important, how much a book costs. It certainly colors my attitude toward the work. Did I pay full price? Did I pay fifty cents at a stoop sale? Or find it left out on the street in a box? Surely most reviews are influenced by the fact (never taken into account) that the book was provided free of charge. This was a fat paperback, put together from the four-volume Bollingen Edition, containing all the notes to Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin but missing the text itself. An accidental genre. Perhaps that is why it was shelved in Fiction.

I should point out that I, too, have pottered among the stoop sales in Tom's neighborhood and can affirm that they're an excellent reason to visit Brooklyn in the summer.

I should also say that this paragraph reminds me of the time I found a compendium of Matt Groening's Life in Hell cartoons shelved as Religion.