Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch (2021)

 This feels very much like the literary critical equivalent of a coffee table book. Such books have interesting things in them, but the weight is with the illustrations; the text is often blandly secondary. This one has a few illustrations, yes, in quiet black and white, but it definitely is a little "lite" textually, which makes it somewhat unsatisfying. It is a 'journey' around the world, as the title suggests, looking at the literatures of various cultures exemplified in some of their major works. It is written by a professor of comparative literature who has, I presume, put on his populist hat to undertake the project. It's genial, I guess, not piercing or revelatory. Damrosch has the tendency of making personal asides about members of his family or his own personal history - meaning that we have a book which has a small element of memoir alongside its main informative strand. That frankly sits a little uncomfortably. One other thing to mention is the occasional tendency to the glib: summarising sentences at the end of each section which are a bit pat, or referencing about significance which is anodyne and unchallenging. All of that said, it's yet another in the "OK" list, a bit uninspiring, but all right, I suppose.