A reader asks:

What are you picking for Book Club #3?  I’m super antsy … and July is here. Tell! Tell us! Tell us all! Or just respond so I may quietly read while everyone else is blowing shit up over the weekend.

Heh. Well, yes, it is July, and a major political book did not seem like the best way for me to read on the beach this summer. So I picked a book I’ve long wanted to read but never got around to – about an author who remains among my favorite non-fiction masters of all time and bloggeravant la lettre: Montaigne.

The book is How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell.

It’s an innovative approach to biography – it’s really a series of meditations, based on Montaigne’s life and work, on some…