One can only take so much crowing and baying about the bursting of the higher ed bubble. It’s everywhere in the news right now, and the Battle of the Fingerpoint is raging apace, and perhaps your gorge is rising, too. Perhaps, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, you just don’t want to soak yourself in the gloom and doom and shame and blame that have become the affective corners of our national debate about education reform.

Perhaps, instead, you’d like delicious sentences.

Here are some:

He belonged to that class of men–vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever–who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken.

Here are some more:

Patty’s mother was a professional Democrat. She is even now, at the time of this writing, a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce is an open space where poor children can go and do the Arts at state expense.

The first sentences are the opening lines of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar. The second batch is from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which critics are suggesting might be the American War and Peace.

What I love–the way both writers are making art (not to be confused with the Arts!) out of their wearyness with smug, blinkered lives and, in the case of Franzen, the political posturing that comes with them.