The Idiot by Elif Batuman with Rennersistas Waiting for Tom Rose

I love summer for its sense of endlessness; even now, well into adulthood, it feels like the possibility to follow a thought to the other side of thinking—to wallow, or waste, or luxuriate— to exist outside of the formalities of the rest of the year are things I find myself waiting for. Summer. The time that feels most acceptable to simply lie in the grass and think about nothing, or everything, and as if we can see through all of it at the same time. I’ve been thinking about why we come to novels and what a novel really is, which is most definitely another wrong sort of thing, “neither pleasant nor useful,” that I often find myself thinking about. What are we looking for, and why is it that it’s rarely the thing we end up finding? There are things I’m often looking for when I read: stories that surprise me, linguistic experiments, the pleasure of language, narratives that ask more than answer, and novels that follow a feeling to its very depths. Rarely, though, is tenderness a feel