Nicholson Bakker apparently tends to write slow, thoughtful and literary texts- I say ‘apparently’ because I know this now, but not, unfortunately, when I started reading, and my expectations made for a disappointing reading experience.  Instead of ‘contemplative literary novel’, I was primed for ‘book-themed thriller’, largely because I’d picked up The Book Thief and The Thirteenth Tale around the same time as The Anthologist, and both of those books are thriller-esque.  All of which makes this review hard to write as an objective assessment […]