I had no intention of finding much fault as I dug into James Wood’s career retrospective Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997–2019, which gathers what must be Wood’s favorite pieces from previous books collecting his magazine writing—the best of the best.1 Among The New Yorker’s back-of-the-book crew, my preferences run to Anthony Lane and Louis Menand, but over the years I’ve found Wood to be sound enough. Two of his pieces for that magazine are among the best I’ve come across in its pages. One (reprinted as the opener of this volume) relates how, as a dutiful piano student and daily choir singer in his boyhood in provincial Durham, England, young James became fascinated with the rock drummer Keith Moon (of The Who) and made mastering the drums an unexpected new goal. Notable here are Wood’s exuberance (Moon’s “many-armed, joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming”), an amusing application of literary terminology to the art of smashing things (“Moon is the drummer of enjambment” deploys a poetry term for Moon’s spilling-over style), and an engrossing wealth of technical detail; Wood notes that “a good dry snare [drum]” that sounds like a dog’s bark differentiates hard rock from soft rock, in which the snare is tuned more loosely, creating a “drippy” effect.

Another of Wood’s finest New Yorkermoments (not, alas, republished here) was a glorious eulogy to his Scottish mother published in 2016, a tribute to a life of