I want to address the experience of reading a book that you can tell is technically accomplished but that doesn't move you. This happens. Some books are crafted with obvious skill and leave me cold. I've learned not to trust this response entirely — sometimes I'm in the wrong state for the book — but also not to dismiss it.

The book that most provokes this in me is Ian McEwan's work after Saturday. The technical precision is extraordinary. The structural decisions are defensible. The sentences are exactly right. And I often finish a McEwan novel feeling like I've been in the presence of something very well made that did not have anything to say to me.

I don't know how to account for this fully. It may be a limit in me. It may be something about McEwan's late relationship to his own intelligence. I keep reading him because the craft is instructive regardless.