On Sundays my father brought home the New York Times and a dozen bagels. We spread out the sections on the dining room table and sometimes read aloud to each other. Mostly, we ate our bagels and read in silence. The Book Review used to run "Noted with Pleasure" on its back page, a series for which it excerpted passages from a current book. "Noted with Pleasure" has gone the way of the "author's queries" (who remembers those?) but I've saved a few from the early 1990s. Here are two of my favorites:
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