BOOK BARN

#289: THE NUMBERS THAT CAN NEVER BE COUNTED. Still another fine example of a book which snuck up on me from behind and jumped into my hands: A Hundred Movements for a Fan, poems by Paul Claudel. In the nineteenth century, a new enthusiasm in France for Japanese culture led to the discovery and collection of that country’s beautifully painted paper fans: every lady had to have one. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé (who in his spare time edited a magazine extolling the new luxury

#288: RED FLOWERS. Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China (Crown, 2025) is a brisk and sobering read, written with a journalist’s sharp eye for the individual story that opens up whole levels of sociological comment. In reaction to the breakup of the Communist Party in Russia, Xi Jinping began to fear that the increasing freedoms in China, themselves in reaction against the severity of the Cultural Revolution, were a pos

#287: STONER. John Williams’s novel Stoner, is about a man who, born on a farm in Missouri, discovers at college not only a love of literature but a vocation to teach. The book moves with an utterly sure-handed, unrushed solidity; it has a tragic sense that recalls the great Russian novelists, with their ability in a paragraph to strip a character down to the bone. Movies about teachers have buried us in so much candied floss on the subject that this sobriety of observati