My favourite book of 2023

Or, writing about eating about writing about eating

How many quotations can you jam into a piece of writing before it no longer counts as your own? Any reader of this newsletter will recognize that, for me, the question is not merely academic. Weaving the best lines on a given subject into a discernable point of view is the name of this specific game.

And so let me answer the question with a quotation: “If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research.”

And if you pull the juiciest bits from a lifetime of books and weave them together around a loose memoir, you get the most purely enjoyable book of 2024: