The Thousands

Call me lowbrow, but it’s not often that I get a hankering to read essays. I just don’t have the discipline. About 500 words in I’ll start getting restless. Around the 1000 word mark I’ll decide I need tea. Then conveniently, on my way back from the kitchen, I’ll come across something that I simply must read RIGHT NOW, like the instructions for my blender or a week old newspaper, and it’s all over. I have no idea how I made it through university.

Despite this, I bought Zadie’s book of essays recently, because I think she’s ace. Yes, she’s precocious and annoyingly attractive and it’s fashionable to pretend you don’t like her, but shut up because you totally do, or at least you will once you’ve read this book. With her entirely natural enthusiasm, she makes essays engrossing and enjoyable – the way they should be.**Thoughtful but not pompous, agile but not glib, witty but not cruel, Changing My Mind combines literary criticism – mostly first published in The New York Review of Books and The Guardian – with memoir, writerly advice, reportage, and a season’s worth of pithy film reviews.

Five essays in I’m still going strong, and if I can do it you can too.