Reviewing Tony Judt’s Reappraisals, Capilano University philosophy professor and literary commentator Stan Persky remarks, “the book is strikingly more coherent and tightly argued than one might expect from a compilation of seemingly disparate essays.” It is a comment that could just as easily be applied to Reading the 21st Century, a collection that includes the Judt review alongside many other reviews and essays from the first decade of our new millennium.

Persky has structured the material so that the book as a whole stands as “an assessment of the important intellectual currents and the books that gave expression to them in the first decade of the 21st century.” So there are chapters on books about the new atheism, the fallout from 9/11, the economic crisis, and a wide variety of fiction from around the world (poetry is left out). But perhaps the central theme is the fate of books themselves. Persky pulls no punches in his essay “Ignorance in the Desert,” seeing “the decline of book reading and the deterioration of knowledge as an impending cultural catastrophe.” He concludes the collection by sounding a “code red” alarm for cultural literacy.

What makes Reading the 21st Century so appealing, however, isn’t this structural coherence, but Persky’s facility with the essay-review form. As a way of demonstrating that his reading is “not an abstract exercise,” he makes use of personal and professional experiences “to show the relevance of books to our lives.” It is an engaging, idiosyncratic approach that always lets us know where he is coming from and what he is bringing to the table. Most reviewers shy away from injecting themselves into the frame so much, but Persky’s method is refreshing.

As with any such book, there is much to quarrel with. For example, little is said about Canadian writing, and two essays on Philip Roth is at least one too many considering how disappointing this master’s output has been over the past decade. But as Persky admits, every reader is reading a different 21st century, and in a different way. His own reading is an alert defence of the important, but now “endangered activity” of public criticism.