To rec­on­cile these two impulses–the impulse to skim that today’s media teaches us and the impulse to suck just the tini­est morsel of life’s mar­row and thereby learn some­thing from a decrepit old book–I sus­pect the typ­i­cal reader reaches for the sim­plest lit­er­a­ture avail­able. Hence Harry Pot­ter. Hence John Grisham and Dan Brown. Assum­ing that most of these over­sim­pli­fied are sim­ply remixes of bet­ter, more pow­er­ful sto­ries, I do not begrudge these read­ers their books. There are other read­ers. There are bet­ter books. To each his own. […]