The lobster essay is famous. The McCain essay is better.

If you read only the lobster essay you'll have read a good essay and missed the book. Everybody knows the lobster one. Nobody talks about Up, Simba — campaign reporting from the back of a bus that grasps modern politics better than most of the books written since about how modern politics works. His section on why a manufactured moment of sincerity still moves people who know precisely how it was manufactured is the best writing in the collection.

On the footnotes, which is where every conversation about him ends up: they aren't decoration. Two-thirds carry the qualification that would have made the main text dishonest if it had been cut, and the other third are a man unable to stop himself, and I'd rather have both than neither.

The Updike review is a hatchet job. Unfair, gleeful, going after the man and not merely the novel, and I laughed out loud on a train and then felt slightly grubby about it. I'm not going to pretend I'd defend that piece in a seminar.

Where the collection sags is the dictionary essay, an argument about usage conducted at a length only somebody being paid by the word would attempt.

Eight. Start with the McCain piece and work outwards from there.