“A good read.” That expression is everywhere about us these days. However humble its beginnings, its incorporation into the critical lingo of the established literary press has vested it with apparent respectability. Before long, William Safire or another student of picturesque usage will comment on the origins and spurious legitimacy of this recent attachment to our linguistic arsenal. It is perhaps no accident that it was an expert on the allegory of language—and an erstwhile Californian—who introduced this designation some two years ago into the solemn deliberations of the PMLA editorial board. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific manuscript that incited this spontaneous and pithy assessment; but I do know that the newfound objective measure took immediate root as one of the board's many evaluative criteria. Most likely, the term fastened onto a way of perceiving and reading that we had been engaging in all along but for which no such neat tag had been readily available.