The ones that got away
As CC books editor, I get to peruse a lot of books. Too bad I can’t review them all.
When I started as books editor at the Century, my predecessor said to me with a gleam in his eye: “Boxes and boxes of books are delivered to your office, and it never slows down. It’s like Christmas every day!” He was right—if your idea of Christmas is being inundated with more books than you could ever read on everything from politics to scripture to fiction to cooking.
Perusing these many books and deciding which ones to send out for review is one of the great joys of the job, and one of the challenges. There are far more books that are well written, interesting, and worthy of review than there is space in the magazine to review them.
Deciding which books to review is more art than science. Many of the books on my shelves are impressive, but their focus is on a narrow or obscure topic, often in a scholarly manner. Nothing is automatically off the table, but I figure there’s only so much interest in, for example, a detailed account of the idea—found in second- and third-century Eastern Mediterranean texts—that every person has a secret divine twin.
