“PERHAPS UNSURPRISINGLY, it is not easy to review a commonplace book, or even to define it.”
“The Oxford English Dictionary is periphrastically unhelpful: “a book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.””
“This certainly describes J. D. McClatchy’s recent addition to the tradition, although it could describe a lot of things.”
“Reviewing a commonplace book is a bit like evaluating a recently completed magpie’s nest, or bowerbird’s bower (to adopt McClatchy’s own analogy), except that each glistering oddment is itself a kind of achieved work of art.”
“Each quotation must ideally feel as if it has been recently uncovered, yet at the same time writ somewhere in stone.”
“Where, then, does Sweet Theft fall?”
“In the same way that his living room is filled with a diverse cocktail of artifacts from established cultures and traditions, his Sweet Theft is exquisite.”
“The book, McClatchy tells us, is meant to be sipped, not gulped.”
“Occasionally, and perhaps inevitably, Sweet Theft feels less like a means of appreciating this kind of literate writing than like the compiler’s bid to install himself among the pantheon of eloquent favorites (headed by Horace).”
“Of course, this is a weakness inherent in the genre — for isn’t the act of publicizing one’s prodigious reading and exquisite taste always, in part, a form of bragging?”
“Isaac Nowell is a writer who lives in Cornwall, United Kingdom.”