It has been a good year for the obituarists among us. I suppose every year is, when you think about it, though it nevertheless seems that there have been more obituaries than usual lately, at least within my own particular spheres of interest. Death notices, appreciations, take-downs. (It’s always better to wait until someone is unable to respond before you put the boot in.) There was Wolfe, then Roth, then Bourdain, then Naipaul, with names new to me—Jonathan Gold’s, for example—thrown in for good measure along the way, added to the must-read list. Each death has brought with it a tide of pre- and post-packaged post-mortems, some literary, all literal.

It almost goes without saying that my engagement with these hundreds of articles—which have ranged from your standard New York Times-style fare to more specific, even niche, analyses—has precluded any engagement with the work the dead actually produced while living. I have downloaded that work and will eventually get around to it, but someone else is always dying and adding to the pile. A hundred new obits are dropping each week, meaning that Portnoy’s Complaint remains unread, A House for Mr Biswas unopened.