National Perspective: This year, if you’re reading essays, you’re lucky enough

Pop into any gift shop near a tourist lake, and you will see a pillow embroidered with this truth: If you're lucky to live by a lake, you are lucky enough. Now that the holiday gift season is over, I have my own version: If you were lucky enough to get a copy of the new book "The Glorious American Essay" this month, then you are lucky enough.

In the pages of this volume, edited by the Columbia University nonfiction professor Phillip Lopate, you will see the glory of America writ large — or, more specifically, written in fairly small but eminently approachable type. And just by breezing through the table of contents and seeing the names Walt Whitman, Jane Addams, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Martin Delany, Finley Peter Dunne and Willa Cather, you will get a sense that if you are lucky to be a devoted reader, you are lucky enough.