I have personally come to prefer The Guardian's coverage of books, and other arts over the New York Times's, mainly because of its expansive scope and heterogeneity. Besides The Guardian Book Review that covers poetry every week will outrank the more "journalistic/current affair-sy" NYT Book Review in my scales any day. Then the essays and excerpts Guardian prints are far more extensive than that can be found in NYT.

I also like the fact that Guardian doesn't maintain scores, i.e., best selling lists like the ones found in NYT; whose lists which have now become the de facto Dow Jones index of a book's sales popularity here in the United States, never mind its intrinsic worth or the lemming effect (or should we call in the tipping point effect that made Caldwell’s "Tipping Point" a NYT bestseller?) such lists may induce in the reading populace.

So here are some pieces worth reading from this week's Guardian Review: Doris Lessing's essay on D.H. Lawrence's life and "Lady Chatterley's Lover". I would also recommend Geoff Dyer's "gate crashing" book, "Out of Sheer Rage", which I haphazardly plucked up for a dollar, and enjoyed immensely to the DHL fans. A review of Tom McCarthy's "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", which says Steven Spielberg is making a Tintin movie. I am buying tickets in advance for this one. This one should be of interest to certain hill-rollers I know of in Merry Olde England. If Dr. Johnson did it, so can they!!

On a train to somewhere days beat their wings over the face of a superbly round sun like untracked Vs of birds at dawn Time ravishes and ravages everything: as black ink from the bottle is used to write the word Time, the color of a few strands of hair changes to grey, to white

These sleepy faces sitting in these bucket seats will be different next time as they emerge from the dark of distance into a changing sky in which one always hears a horizon note*, to changing paper headlines with their ceaseless burning cities

And the poet is left here hefting words as sparrows build nests season after season under the rafters of a witnessing sky

* The steady drone note, usually produced by a tanpura, heard in traditional Indian music is sometimes called the horizon note