The pencil, Theo Marchetti argues in this delightful and obsessive study, is the most underrated machine in the modern world, and by chapter three you will agree with him.
The sentence as a place to live
Publishers will tell you that autumn is the serious season, when the heavy hardbacks arrive and the reviewers sharpen their adjectives. Readers have never paid much attention. They carry what they love onto trains and into waiting rooms, and they recommend it to anyone who stands still long enough.
Everything ever built began as something you could still erase.
What the prize lists miss
What makes this book worth the time is not its plot, which could be summarised on a bus ticket, but its patience. Chapters end a little earlier than you expect. People leave rooms without explaining themselves. You find yourself reading more slowly as you go, which is the highest compliment a novel can receive.
A shelf worth rearranging
Independent booksellers report that handwritten shelf notes now outperform almost every form of paid promotion. It is a small and cheering fact: in a year of algorithmic everything, the most persuasive recommendation is still a stranger with a biro and an opinion.
There are flaws, and they are honest ones. The middle section sags under one subplot too many, and the ending arrives with a neatness the rest of the book has spent three hundred pages resisting. Forgive it. Very few writers working today are this interested in how people actually behave.
