Monday Scramble: Coming Up Short
We spent a great deal of last week reading — and not writing. That’s our excuse, and we’re sticking with it. Of this week’s three new Portico pages, George Saunders’s “Victory Lap,” this week’s New Yorker story, is the first. We liked the story very much, but we’re glad that we don’t live in its part of the world.
 Which seems right next door to the setting of The Invention of Lying, a gentle comedy that will probably offend earnestly religious people. We wish that people in this movie’s part of the world really did regard churches as “quiet places for thinking about the Man in the Sky” — and no more.
Finally, this week’s Book Review review. We were glad that we’d already two of the books under review, or our wish list would be that much impossibly longer. Neil Sheehan’s Fiery Peace in a Cold War looks like a worthy sequel to Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb.