Sometimes you come back from a PAX and it seems like you got away clean but then a couple days later every free channel in your body runs with rivulets of hot mucus. In such times, the humble book may provide succor. And maybe it could also have provided succor back in 2004 or whatever but here we are. The most important thing is that someone is discovering Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel for the first time. This supersedes all other considerations, even murder, and is cause for celebration.

Modern series books are essentially a product with years of story DLC. You’re lucky if you get away with just three. I remember a year or so ago when people were trying to figure out what to call a product that you purchase and then… have, I saw the words Buy To Own presented unironically more than once, and that was when I learned you could cry on the inside - cry within, cry until your lungs fill and stretch like balloons. What an idiotic age we’re being forced to endure. In any event, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel is just… a book, a single, complete, thousand page book that has the entire “triptych” or whatever Satan would have carved it into between between two firm covers. And you’ll need them to be rigid, because you’re gonna have to hold the fuck onto them during this non-stop magical journey. It’s as good as a book can possibly be, and if you haven’t read it yet I envy you with a nearly murderous heat.

He’s reading it digitally, like I read most books these days. I’m not sure books from the Black Library would be improved overmuch by physicality; those books are essentially a drug I take so I can watch the pretty pictures in my mind. It’s vitally important that I know about these doomed eunuchs and what they’re getting up to in space.

But House of Leaves I would still read physically, otherwise you’d miss something important about it. If that was the only choice you had it’s still worth it but is also somehow evidence of an unseemly turpitude of spirit. But for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, the book is like having a baroque prop to enjoy it with - a feelie, something you might have gotten with the Collector’s Edition, an artifact of the strange world the story takes you to. You can travel in your mind to a place where things like this might have been real, and marvel at the ingenuity of our benighted forbears.

(CW)TB out.