We are told, endlessly, that our attention is the currency of the age. If that is true, then the deepest extravagance available to the modern person is to spend a whole Saturday on a single book.
Not a chapter. Not a summary. The book. From breakfast to nightfall, in the green velvet chair by the window, with the phone in a drawer two rooms away and the kettle within reach.
To read for eight hours is the last honest form of travel.
We recommend, this season, a long Russian novel, a shorter Italian one, and — for the truly ambitious — a re-reading of something you were assigned at seventeen and did not, at the time, understand.