Reporting, by David Remnick

Sometimes it's fun just to read a book for the quality of the writing - the pure skill with which it is written, rather than what it is actually about. The New Yorker magazine is one of the best places to find such writing, and often on fascinating subjects too. The editor of that magazine is David Remnick, author of Reporting. Reporting collects Remnick's best essays from The New Yorker, neatly split into five subjects: politics, authors, Russia, Israel and boxing. All are subjects that Remnick is enthusiastic about and expert on – he even won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Lenin's Tomb on the collapse of the Soviet Union. The pieces here on Russia are informed and informative, accessible to anyone, yet rich enough for most experts in the field. Other pieces, such as High Water (about New Orleans), are similarly excellent. In fact, all of the pieces here are brilliantly written. This is unsurprising, because if they hadn't been they wouldn't have made the pages of The New Yorker, and certainly wouldn't have made it into this collection of Remnick's best work. What you have here then is double-filtered excellence; fun to read for the quality of the prose, and fascinating for the content itself. [Keir Hind]