A Mash Note to Moby-Dick

IT IS A PECULIAR genre very much of this moment: the book whose purpose is to introduce another book—personal mash-up trailer, fan-written liner notes, chatty “personalized” trot, Lonely Planet for a barely sketched continent. Proust is the usual subject, but the genre has now stretched in direct proportion to the alarm about the fate of books, or at least long ones. But books are obviously not a moribund form when some writers want to write new ones in order to recommend old ones.