CAAF: Morning coffee

• What you’ll find in Alberto Manguel’s 30,000 volume library in rural France: A section devoted to versions of the Faust legend, Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, lots of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick, Plato, thousands of detective novels, and “dozens of very bad books that I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad.” What’s not in the library: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, because “I felt [it] infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain.” (This is an older link but a goodie. Via Bookdwarf.)
• Zadie Smith’s appreciation of the best of all books, Middlemarch, begins with a look at Henry James’s review of the novel, written when he was 30: “To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant.”