Why do book reviews have to be so damn descriptive? All too often, one need only choose between reading the book or reading the review, because the latter’s retelling of the plot makes for a perfectly adept Cliffs notes of the former. This complaint applies also to typical film reviews by the arbiters of upper mainstream taste, in the NYT or WSJ. Felix is prone to plot exegeses too, in a blog no less, where he could leave the tedious recounting to IMDB and focus instead on opining, but he insists on retelling plots because he is in fact auditioning for gigs writing such formulaic fare. Well, that’s my suspicion, in any case. Good writing his may be (plodding at times, perhaps in need of a few memorable phrases, but honest), though blogging it is notWhere else to put this? Felix and I bet a bottle of vintage Veuve Cliquot on Sunday in NYC over the number of countries that originally joined EMU. I said 12. Felix said 11. What’s the point of doing these wagers if they are secret, I ask you?.

Or else, book reviews barely touch upon the book they are meant to review. The reviewer might relegate the ostensible raison d’etre of the article to a mention of the book in a paragraph or three, or in the footnotes, appended to a 5,000 word rant he has been chomping at the bit to see in print but has been too lazy to research rigorously.

As I flicked through the last issue of The New York Review of Books at Felix and Michelle’s this past weekend in New York, and found articles of both persuasions, I imagined the eventual point of this post would be to lament book reviews that aren’t. Then, on my way back to the airport on Tuesday, I picked up the current edition, billed the 40th Anniversary IssueThe entire contents are online! Download everything while you can and read at your leisure, if you can’t buy.. I did not know then that its pages deliver a torrent of stunningly good pieces, or I would not then have mentally marked for blogging a tirade against bogus anniversaries. Fortieth anniversary? What makes for an anniversary worth celebrating these days? Years that are multiples of 10, or 25, or maybe 5? There are, for instance, far too many 35th anniversaries, often procured by a committee too drained of original ideas to think of anything but marking the fact their institution has limped along a further 5 years.

And to what extent is a millenial anniversary any more worthwile or instructive than an anniversary marking 1003 years? None that I can fathom, save for the satisfaction of seeing similar digits aligned prettily. And why use years at all? Why not celebrate 10,000 days a few months after one’s 27th birthday? One thousand months shortly after 83? Okay, maybe I’ll concede years are handier, but why certain multiples are more conducive to feasting baffles me.

But I’ve decided such invective would be misplaced here, for in fact any excuse that can produce such a crackling good read as the current issue will do.

An inventory of what I’ve read so far:

Luc Sante writes as if he had been commissioned preëmtively to debunk the main thesis of the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back: That everything old is new again in New YorkMy own visit this past weekend confirmed the ludicrousness of the NYT’s conceit that today’s New York is much like 70s New York; I was a kid in 70s New York and so have a good baseline for comparison.. But Sante’s piece is so much more — it’s a declaration of love for a city that has moved on, and it’s a sharp description of life in the East Village in the early 80s, a perfect companion to Please Kill Me.

Joan Didion writes a serious yet hilarious review of those rapture novels, where all good Christians go to heaven, leaving us atheists, agnostics and Muslims to implement a UN world government, a single global currency, and Satan as our leader. She then segues into an exposition of how the assumptions underpinning these books are familiar turf for a president who sees himself as doing God’s work on earth, or at least acts as if he does.

And where else but in TNYRoBs can an academic pissing match about the nature of Jesus that’s been dormant since April (when I blogged it) resume so effortlessly?

Eminem’s lyrics are dissected by Andrew O’Hagan — a real service, as I never catch lyrics — to underpin the argument that the bond between Eminem and his audience is a lot more ironic that the Tipper Gores give him credit for.

There is so much more worth reading: Pieces on Cesare Pavese, Paul Krugman, Garrison Keilor, George Orwell (yet again)… I’ve only just begun.

Which is a good thing — I will have to feast on its contents until the next issue hits Stockholm, delayed (where, at customs?) by the usual few weeks. The one I hold in my hands certainly won’t be seen in Stockholm coffeeshops this side of November. Maybe I should rent it out.