A good indicator of how much I enjoyed reading a book is the number of dog ears I made. Sacrilege to some of you, I know. But hereabouts, each dog ear represents something vital, something I feel I must tell you about when I review it. The Shock of the Old spans 212 pages and I have dog-eared 17 of them. It's an unheard of number. Clearly I can't spend 17 paragraphs talking about these vital points because if I were truly wise enough to make them, I'd have written the book myself. Oh, how I wish.